Or, in other words, here's a few random thoughts and ideas I thought I'd like to toss out for wizzes and mortals alike to ponder, comment, point & laugh at and so on.
As I look at the current open guilds, I see a lot of guilds that are very restricting for your playstyle. To be more exact, I see a lot of guilds that are very exp-oriented and have close to zero eq party potential. While I appreciate that people have different favoured playstyles, I also think it'd be a good idea to slowly work towards more multipurpose guilds. As it is now, typically people reinc into the few specific eq-reincs (which they generally don't seem to like to exp with) for few weeks, do eq and then reinc back to whatever they like to play with. This makes for a good bit of headache for whoever the sorry Z..sod who decides to lead the circus, since people are in a hurry to get to reinc back. Our playerbase being relatively small, more eq-viable guilds would probably inspire more eq parties overall. While it is true to some extent that slapping archers and clandestine archers on top of whatever guild makes the character somewhat viable, I think it's more interesting if the various guilds could use their own special tricks and traits, instead of an open sub.
One interesting way would be altering combat significantly, moving from the static "everyone in the front row is equal"-approach to something bit more complicated. Since many of the 'exp-guilds' are offtank guilds, it might be interesting to change the mechanics so that offtanking is viable for eq. That'd probably involve some new 'evasive combat methods'^2 skills, or combination of army battle tactics for main tank and guild special evasion skills for offtanks. Some of these could be modified old skills, shadowdancing for example might do the trick for dancers. Various defensive skills could also be tweaked, for example dodge+avoid hits could be the shadowdancer/monk choice along with light armours. Medium armours might hinder those considerably, so rangers might opt for medium armours+weapon parry, and templars&army would concentrate on shield parry since that would be least affected by their other great defensive asset, the plate armor. What I'd like to achieve is that carefully built offensive tanks would have enough defence to survive the occasional round or two they get hit while still doing what they do best, damage. Also, changing the various defensive skills to be bit more independent and interchangeable would make combat a bit more varied and give more personality to different guilds.
I realize this might lessen the demand for healers especially for exp parties, and although I'm tempted to say that's a good thing since healers are typically too few, this might be compensated with increased offensive ability which also might make healers more an interesting choice for many and also open the possibility of adding varying levels of healing ability for some other current or future guilds without stepping too much on air priest toes.
As I've said before, I feel strongly about guilds capitalizing on the aspects that make them unique instead of the 'slap on basic melee skills to x%, add generic 300-400 damage offensive skill with different name' -approach, so I've thought about a few changes for rangers along those lines. I'd completely do away with the hidden blanket combat bonuses (and penalties) for terrain. Instead of those, I'd increase the rural combat and animal lore special hit damage considerably, mostly based on stats since they're relatively cheap and single skills. That way they'd scale somewhat as your character progresses. Another way would be to also make them partially based on weapon damage, though then you'd probably have to make the chance based on weapon speed, and possibly add some weapon independent base damage to avoid big weapons (which imo are against the ranger theme somewhat) being too good.
Second part would be to soften the cap on whirling blades damage a bit, allowing stats to raise the damage more than they do now. This would be accompanied by increased penalties for slow/big/bad type weapon. The idea is that a ranger who wields fast small slashing weapons could compensate for the loss of base melee damage with considerably increased wb damage. Those who use big weapons should not notice much of a difference.
The pattern masteries could also have a tiny effect on the cap, though nothing huge.
Now, since I am a mortal, I do not have any numbers to back this up, but the general consensus seems to be that the weapons around sabre size are somewhat underhanded against bigger weapons, but that might also be due to people overvaluing one hard hit against multiple softer ones. I know some wizards used to run a script on various parties to check who did what amount of damage, so this is probably easy to check.
If the damage is still found lacking because of the loss of the ow bonuses, some modest basic combat skill increases might also work, though I'd rather work with the wb. Concentrated attack and continuous assault would probably be the ones to uptune, though I know everybody loves find weakness and enhance crit too
Last bit I'd want to change about rangers is to make those party-friendly buffs of ours actually useful. The reagents are a hassle, especially the skins, but it would greatly help the situation if both guided aim and barkskin could be multitargeted, and they'd only consume 1 reagent / cast even if they're cast at multiple targets. Also adding a slight enhance crit/find weakness bonus to guided aim would greatly increase its value.
And please fix barkskin yet again to show the effect in slot prot values & overall prot, think it's broken once more
The overall thing I've tried to achieve here is to shift some damage from the bloated ow bonuses to the ranger special skills, to round the performance somewhat, reducing the difference between indoors and outdoors and to improve faster, more rangerish (in my view) weapons slightly (if that is even needed).
Next part of my incoherent babbling is about my favorite problem child, the earth priests. I think the idea is cool, but as much as I appreciate the work various wizards have put into the guild, I consider them pretty much broken at the moment. While they have their uses even at present, I think they could also be a lot better. Unfortunately the concept at the moment is fundamentally flawed, and they seem to be at a dead end, very hard to easily fix without upsetting the balance one way or or another.
The main problem is, you guessed it, the minion! First of all, it takes a party place. That means that in a 9-man setup, the minion would have to be as good as a player (probably tank) to be worth its spot, and also, the priest would have to be good enough to justify HIS spot. If you boost the priest to the same level with other blasters, he'll be overpowered soloing even with the current 'weak' minion. If you boost the minion even close to a real deftank level, well, we've seen how that works
For epriest to work in an eq party you'd have to boost BOTH, and obviously that is approaching absurd when you look at the same two (essentially a solo player) in a party by themselves, or in a smaller than 9man party.Current situation seems to be that the minion seems to do most of the work while epriest spells are tuned down to the level where exp investment in them seems pretty much irrelevant. The impression I got was that all priests did pretty much the same damage with their spells, no matter what stats or exp invested in skills and spells. This is, of course, pretty much mandatory since the minion is such a big part of your power, it doesn't leave much room for priest power to improve.
Another thing is that since the minion power is so much dependant on masteries, and experience means relatively little, it leads to some 'interesting' scenarios when you compare different level priests. Of course you can circumvent the limitations a bit by using a bow, but that's a whole another can of worms.
What I'd propose is that the current minion system would be pretty much scrapped. Instead your minion alone would be mostly just a meatwall, with some defensive abilites, hpmax etc depending on priests skills and masteries. And in combat, you could use a spell, I'll call it 'flogging' here just because i'm feeling particularly evil this morning, that'd grant a considerable offensive boost to the minion. This would be your most sp-friendly way of dealing damage, you'd spend little sp (and maybe minion hp just for the laughs), flog your undead old woman, she'd get pissed and kick ass. The idea here is that the minion damage would not come 'free', you'd have to invest TIME in to it, time that would be away from doing other stuff like blasting or shooting. In this way, you could do high damage with your spells, since you'd have to decide between low sp high physical damage vs bit higher spcost nonphysical damage. Essentially the minion's offensive power would also come actively from the priest, thus reducing the 2in1 wonder powers.
Flogging could take few rounds to cast, and possibly with good skills/masteries last a bit longer than that so you could also squeeze in a blast every now and then, or not, depending on how it needs to be balanced. Then you'd have your exp blasting spells, type or two with moderate sp/dam ratio and those would now actually have room for improvement due to stats and better skills, since you'd have to trade your minion offensive power to use them.
This of course doesn't answer the eq-party problem. For that my solution would be an incorporeal undead which you'd conjure instead of your usual meatwall. This incorporeal undead would allow you to cast various bigger blasts, essentially you'd need a few different types so you might have for example a banshee wail for sonic damage etc. The idea would be that you'd have the oomph for eq, and only take 1 spot, and it would not imbalance your soloing / small party playing.
Onwards before i run out of caffeine. After introducing the new open subs, throwers seem more obsolete than ever. I think they could use a skill, call it 'javelin charge' or whatever, that would allow them to throw their weapon when entering combat. In practice this would probably be toggled on beforehand, and next time when combat initiates for whatever reason (leader moves in on an already aggressive mob or attacks something for example) you'd toss the javelin instantly. Should probably only work from first row and would give those bored (idle) tanks something to do when doing eq. It's possible that someone would abuse this instant damage with in-out tactics, but I'm not sure if throwing damage actually is high enough to make that profitable and that could be prevented with some silly timer or something. In anycase, it'd make throwing a bit different from archery, and would be more in line with how javelins have been used in the history. Also snipping the guild down to 5 levels might be in order, and please do away with the requirements, they serve no function whatsoever except to deterr those last few poor bastards who'd against their better judgement take throwers instead of some actually useful sub
Reward yourself with a cookie if you got this far, I think I have to regen a bit before I continue.
-p
