Tiny Hero Class Changes (Discount week)

[Barristan]

Sentinel is not doing well. It's less used than the Ranger which was just buffed. 6.5% of all Sniper hero's are Sentinel. That leaves two possible conclusions, that it isn't fine, or that its strengths are useless aside from theorycraft and it's useless because of that. Fred went sentinel hero class, I was in TS with him when he did it. What was his reason? No one else had gone Sentinel yet. So, really, at best, only 5 people went Sentinel because they thought it was a good class. I'd suggest looking back at why you all made the decision to replace Duelist rather than just further increase its strengths. I'm sure a solution to those classes could be found from that reasoning.

As far as the rest goes, I'm not criticizing you as a person. I don't care about you as a person. A lot of feature requests don't get any sort of response, a lot of the ones that do get a response are throwaway responses that barely better than nothing, if only because then we know you actually read them. There are a lot of good ideas that we don't know what is going on about them(What's up with support class respecs? Last thing I heard was "it's difficult to implement, it isn't set up that way currently" and that was a few months ago, a few months after the request first appeared). There are so few actual responses to thought out requests(like the above example), and most of those that do get some response that isn't "no." or some other garbage are barely or never followed up on, that most feature requests are posted without expecting anything, it's a joke.

It doesn't matter if every feature request was read, when there is next to no follow up on throwaway comments like "We'll look into it" while most of them don't get responses at all, why would anyone bother to write up another? What a waste. If developers want well thought out suggestions, then developers should give actual responses. There is a clear lack of communication in this area, it's not good. If you have to assign a dog to dole out responses in developers place, then do it, but there must be communication, excuses don't count.

The popularity of a class does not determine if it is broken, rather I am interested in if it can actually the job that people want it to. A ranger with one handed skill is a hybrid which is not inherently attractive to everyone. As such, if someone does not pick it, it does not follow that the class is in need of being fixed. Rather, it is simply the case that we have a play style available to players that not everyone wants to take up. Hero classes exist to increase the availability of different play styles and people will naturally gravitate tot he ones that appeal to them. Certainly a class could be incorrectly implemented but popularity is not a major determinant of that. As such, I consider sentinel to be more or less fine. In fact, if judged within the context of what it is designed to do, it is borderline OP. Being able to stun lock very high level nords with the right equipment and shoot as a sniper. I personally don't see a case for changing that class.

As for how we manage the feature requests you need to remember that we, the developers, owe you nothing. We make this game and we donated weeks of our lives to make it what it is today. So I am not taking your criticism personally, rather, I am simply disregarding your expectations because, quite honestly, they are nonsense. We read feature requests, when we can we respond to them but we have lives outside of NI and you just need to accept that. The present patch is the most thought out and best coded version of NI ever. It has consumed the lives of the two particular devs who have taken it upon themselves to implement. Both have lives beyond NI, as do Hyper, Hande and myself. So what we give you is what you get. Optimal communications is more or less impossible from us at the moment, so you need to manage your attitude and expectations. As for the idea that we have failed to communicate, that is BS. We continue to listen to the player base and although we don't have time to respond to everything every resource we have is presently at work not he upcoming patch.