Tuesday, December 1, 2009

What is a "Knee Jerk Reaction"?

This letter from Craig Morrison on some ideas to help alleviate issues with Casters in Age of Conan.

Basically the change is to take casters and remove their usage of Stamina potions (from certain caster classes) to help balance their skill in PvP, due to their capability to use stuns or roots, and run away to blast the melee player.
This of course takes zero account of PvE...but PvE be damned, so that the melee players will be happy in PvP.
As an added bonus, all CC skills like the stuns and roots will not be usable except in closer quarters...thus eliminating the other issue of cast to root from far away, then blast the melee player.

So, instead of maybe bringing the power of the melee class more in line with the caster, they instead will gimp the casters to thus make it more "fair" to PvP melee.

I am all for balance, but this is the classic example of "Knee Jerk" if I have ever seen it.

If you check the forums, you can find hundreds of threads (I do not exaggerate) of major discussions from players on how to fix the balance. All are better than this move, which shows ZERO skill on Funcoms part, and really truly shows us...Funcom has no skill at developing a game or how to cater to the players needs.

The worst part is this move takes two classes, the Heralds of Xotli and the Dark Templar, both caster classes as well, and lets them keep their stamina pots AND mana usage.

In so many words, I present the two new OP classes.

Anyways, enjoy the thread linked above. Seems there is a major divide on who likes it and who doesn't. Take a wild guess who does...

3 comments:

Jayedub said...

Might be time for me to renew if my HoX is going to be uber!

Anonymous said...

Funcom has no clue where they're going, but to make up for it, they're going to go really, really slowly....

Anonymous said...

What i don't get. Maybe it is just me. But looking at the issue from a logical standpoint. Can one really expect a caster to stand toe to toe with a melee user. That just doesn't make sense. Kiting is what they should do. Just like all ranged classes. Common sense says that if you are taking a beating, you would run. So to deny casters the ability to kite is just not logical. The game mechanics need to be addressed. As in melee users not having enough stamina to chase kiters. And have enough stamina left to use there combos. Funcoms braintrust has decided to "fix" this problem by taking away stamina pots from casters. I'm sure that Funcom is just taking the path of least resistance with this problem. IE. What ever saves them money. If they wanted too. I'm sure they can address the stamina issue in a more productive way.