Tiny Hero Class Changes (Discount week)

[DrWhoCares]

Legionnaire doesn't need any shield skill increase.
Ranger having more two handed sounds nice, because why else is the Eastern Katana available to Snipers?
Legionnaire would only need either a buff in athletics/onehanded, or throwing. That or give it Legionnaire only armor that is both light and damn good armor.
Aventurier, I have not played unfortunately, but it probably just suffers from the same thing Legionnaire does, needs more mobility or damage. Sentinel is doing fine because archers are quick, and on most cases, light. Not to mention their ability to quickshoot, which isn't very possible with a crossbowman. Without an Eastern Repeater, it makes it difficult to run from a fight and still survive.

I don't know shit about stats, but this seems to be decent.

[Harlaus]

Sentinel is doing relatively well, its ability to stun lock, move like the wind along with shoot makes it quite useful. Aventurier certainly is not particularly right and I'm thinking about what to do to it. Open to suggestions.

As for feature requests, I have read every single one of them... Every one ever written. K4mi and Kip have been so busy with the patch that they have not had time to respond to them. Hande is always making maps so he has been busy. Hyper and myself have had real life issues to contend with. So as for the attitude in the last half of that post, have a cup of concrete and harden up. NI is a passion of every dev, the implication that we don't give a stuff can be bottled and sold for the bottle of bollocks that it is.

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.

[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.

[Tsukiyomi]

[quote author=Barristan link=topic=31914.msg197152#msg197152 date=1410523047]

Sentinel is doing relatively well, its ability to stun lock, move like the wind along with shoot makes it quite useful. Aventurier certainly is not particularly right and I'm thinking about what to do to it. Open to suggestions.

As for feature requests, I have read every single one of them... Every one ever written. K4mi and Kip have been so busy with the patch that they have not had time to respond to them. Hande is always making maps so he has been busy. Hyper and myself have had real life issues to contend with. So as for the attitude in the last half of that post, have a cup of concrete and harden up. NI is a passion of every dev, the implication that we don't give a stuff can be bottled and sold for the bottle of bollocks that it is.

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.


[/quote]

Option 3:  A lot of people (you?) aren't clever enough to figure out how to use some classes properly. 

[Hypernoma]

Glad people are enjoying a little change up with the hero classes. Also nice to see input as to how to improve them. There are some huge changes which are being tested just now for the next patch and will see some interesting changes for heroes.

I have always made it very common knowledge that I read every single feature request. However as Barristan has pointed out, we do have real lives and do not always have time to sit down and discuss every point of every thread. What we do is take away the parts from suggestions that we like and then discuss them at about 12am on IRC when I'm finally home from work and have some time to put my feet up. Just because you are not privy to our every discussion does not mean that opinions or posts are not being acknowledged by us. There is little point in us appointing a "dog" to report on every thread as that would take just as much time in briefing someone else as it would have been for us to respond in the first place...

If you wish to discuss this further then feel free to PM me. Having a hissy fit on this thread is just pointless. Constructive criticism, as Barristan has requested, or unadulterated worshipping of NI is all that I'd like to see on this thread from now on

[VM_Sargent_X]

Lord Hyper has Spoken.

All Hail Lord Hypernoma!

[Renji]

My Constructive Criticism on Halberdier...

Pikeman + Halberdier
One handed: 130
Two handed: 120
Polearm: 190 (Very good, love this stat)
Archery: 20
Crossbow: 20
Throwing: 300
Power draw: 1
Power throw: 6
Power strike: 7 (Same as Master Peltast?!?!?! Should remove 1 Ironflesh and turn into power strike...)
Ironflesh: 8 (Helps somewhat, but cannot take damage due to weak armor with little justification for weight)
Athletics: 8 (Add 1 or perhaps lower armor weight? Same speed as regular pike...)
Shield: 7 (Does not help at all with no shield)

Pikeman (Statistics before choosing the hero tree)
One handed: 80
Two handed: 80
Polearm: 160
Archery: 20
Crossbow: 20
Throwing: 300
Power draw: 1
Power throw: 6
Power strike: 5
Ironflesh: 5
Athletics: 8
Shield: 4

Pikeman + Master Peltast (This class is just pure kite and overused, balanced enough to be boring)
One handed: 130
Two handed: 120
Polearm: 185
Archery: 20
Crossbow: 20
Throwing: 325
Power draw: 1
Power throw: 7
Power strike: 7
Ironflesh: 6
Athletics: 10
Shield: 6

Pikeman + Marauder (Could use it's own set of marketplace items like polearms?)
One handed: 130
Two handed: 120
Polearm: 225
Archery: 20
Crossbow: 20
Throwing: 300
Power draw: 1
Power throw: 6
Power strike: 8 (Should buff 1 or give 1 point to ironflesh)
Ironflesh: 5 (Peltast should be weaker, not slasher class)
Athletics: 10
Shield: 5

I wanted to reply to this thread with a thought that popped into my mind. I figured out the reason that people went Master Peltast was due to the throwing abilities and the speed. Marauders and Peltasts have the same athletics, while Halberdier is lacking 2 below. I guess a turning point would be either to add 1 athletics to the class of Halberdier, or perhaps to lower the weight of the armor by a few points of your choosing. I also suggest that you could do to the class what you did with the zweihanders and make a somewhat marketplace add-on for a few items. I also made a request thread for shield use for Halberdier around a year and had no response really.

Marauder also needs some love, but I'm expressing my opinions on these classes. To be honest, I went Halberdier a year ago and find that it works decently in normal, but could use armor buff to justify weight, or a decrease in weight or +1 to athletics. Head armor should be given to the armored class too. I find myself dying too often from trying to do what the class was made for, slashing and running backwards. :/ I would rather have people choosing Halberdier for LOVE of the class rather than the price.

BTW... These are just suggestions, not outlines. Would be nice though XD

[Mr Killer]

Since renji didn't post a link to the topic on shields in his post above, i looked it up and here it is http://forum.nordinvasion.com/index.php?...207.0.html

[Sargent Q]

Just to note.  The 100k Halberdier armor has more armor than the Chain Mail over Leather house crafted armor for regular pikemen.

[Barristan]

@ Renji

This stuff is really good Renji. Will comment on a couple of items. I am loath to move the power strike of any class up to 9. It is very easy to suggest a change to a class by moving the cap up. I would prefer to keep things within the boundaries of we have already established as the high end. The reason for that is Hero Classes are not supposed to be hugely different from the t4, rather they are an addition, a little spice on top. A t4 pikeman only has a power strike of 5, so eight is already a massive increase, 9 I hope you can understand is just a bridge too far.

The halberdier ironflesh skill is nice and high to stand it apart from the rest, soaking damage is its number 1 perk. So as a result, with an ironflesh of 8 and a still quite squishy character we can conclude that the issue here is gear related and we will take a look at that. Halberdier shielding skill is for emergencies, given the playstyle involved with the class a shield is not really appropriate. I see that stat as a nod to the players on servers but it is not something we necessarily want to build on.

As for your suggestions about Halberdier athletics, we might have set the armor weight values too high on that class but as I said we are certainly thinking along the same lines on this. The marketplace suggestion is also a really good one we have been considering that for a while. I hope this gives you an idea of where we are coming from Renji.