Instead of pulling flawed and inaccurate numbers out of a hat, maybe you should try playing your game. If you think the data you have collected is anywhere close to representative of how the classes perform compared to one another, you are delusional. You can only hide behind fudged numbers and fancy words for so long before you expose yourselves as frauds.
P L A Y Y O U R G A M E
It's insane how little you know about how the classes actually perform, your TI-89 graphing calculator can't get you out of this one.
@noworries#8859 I have a suggestion to address the doubts raised in this thread about the damage performance numbers that you have shared. From the data that you have collected, and only considering TOMM completions, you can identify the consistently top performing players of each DPS class. Why not invite them to a TOMM run (i.e. 7 DPS, one from each class, with the remaining 3 slots filled by tanks and healers)? If the invited players are willing and comfortable, you can stream the run during one of your community streams. I am sure that this will generate a lot of interest for the stream. However, if the invited players are not comfortable to run TOMM on a live stream, you can do this run in private and share the results with the wider community thereafter. For your kind consideration please. Thank you.
if those numbers where what actually happens in the average completet ToMM run, literally noone would every complain about class balance. Also you would see a bunch of Arbiters, Barbarians, Warlocks etc topping the damage boards, since a 5% difference can easily be overcome by playing better.
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mamalion1234Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,415Arc User
The only way those numbers are even remotely close to being true is perhaps if you include (catastrophically) failed runs. There is sure going to be a lot of those so they will have a huge impact. Training runs with one or two strong dps players the same. Also because most of those dps specs aren't accepted for runs, I doubt some of the numbers (dps GF is probably the best example) have any significance.
The numbers were for ToMM runs over the period specified and it is accurate data that has been normalized for better comparison. We also have the whisker plots to see the full range of every player over the time period and where they fall.
The point of showing the ToMM data is not to suggest that in all aspects of the game the classes are that close together. It was intended to show that 1) when top item levels and top skill levels combine, the classes potentials are a lot closer than players would typically expect and 2) ToMM is not exclusive to any sub group of classes, although it is certainly easier for some classes than others.
We don't use that particular data set for where our major class balance efforts are targetted, we focus more on the top 10% game wide, which does show bigger percentage differences between the paragon paths, and does drop Dreadnought down quite a bit more as I had mentioned in that previous post.
Since this data was taken from TOMM runs and normalised for better comparison so why make this confusing and lets stick with TOMM as an example. So from your findings, a wiz is apparently only doing 6% more than fighter ST dps and 1.4% more than Hellbringer?
What if i can prove to you that actually, a cleric can out dps a fighter, warlock and even barb and rogue and on par with rangers?
I always enjoy watching top tier players show off their skills, so I would certainly enjoy seeing a cleric performing that well. For clarification, in game wide data the Arbiter does outperform Dreadnought already, with a larger sample size it wouldn't be surprising at all to see them also exceed fighter in ToMM. But it would certainly be fun to watch an Arbiter go toe to toe with a top tier ranger.
In the end though, that by itself wouldn't change our plans to bring Arbiter and Dreadnought up to the target range for balance as on average they're both below where we'd like them to be.
Thank you, it is appreciated. I do not doubt your findings, like i said, i have seen barbs dish out 286k encpds over 3-4minutes dummy test (probably more for the one barb in my guild). I am sitting comfortably at 300encpds on a dummy with no lion heart and 193k power but i have another build which presumably can do much better but harder to play. What i do think makes the difference is how difficult the class is. Wizards, rangers and assassins are just too easy to play and can easily mimic a dummy test in TOMM than an arbiter or a blademaster can, so my dummy tests over 3-5minutes are too difficult to mimic in a real dungeon and that's where most arbiters in TOMM fail. That doesn't mean the class doesn't have the capacity. The reason why most of us are infuriated is because the select few that know their class thoroughly are judged because the majority of others are not able to play their class optimally and thus we are discriminated. I will look forward to arbiter adjustments as i have so much to share but making gear complement them and making their mistakes less unforgiving in the kit can be a way forward. I can't however say anything about hellbringer, but i have seen amazing hellbringers, however, TOMM favours wiz way too much so they are always too far ahead in dps. It is widely known that to play wiz optimally, you have to smash the board as fast as you can, whereas arbiter is all about timing, a well thought out class i must say but a little clunky right now though.
Can you show with act log your encdps + the encounters u use?
First of all before you are giving us these numbers you need to clarify the conditions. Such as: - Who were the players of each classes? We need to know if they know the class and play it well enough. - Which classes using which items? Weapon enchantments like Bilethorn or Vorpal? What were the main artifacts? Which classes used debuff artifacts? Which ones self dps artifacts? If so are they Soul Sight Crystal, Decanter, Envenomed Journal or maybe broken Darkened Journal? What about belt neck set, everyone Demo set or something else? All of these affect dps by a lot. - On these paths what were the chosen feats, class features and powers? On a class like Arcanist feat selections are really important. - In how many runs have you gathered data? Were these runs all succesfull or did you count failed runs? - On the runs how many dps players were there for each class? Was it 1 for each path like a rainbow team? Because for example Rouges share bleed, so if there are more than 1, its easier for them to do more damage.
These are the ones that came to my mind in 5 minutes. I am sure there are lots of information needs to be explained.
Whoever finished ToMM or even did a few decent runs can easily say that these numbers are far from being true. Either you are terrible at gathering data and making tests, so you failed so hard with these numbers or you are also aware of the huge gap between classes but you want to hide it and don't say it. I can't decide which one is worse.
We have been playing with this pure unbalanceness for 2 months. I hope you better do some balance for Mod18. Because people are really tired of seeing only Wizard, Rouge and Hunter dps being wanted. And I really hope this time you consider all of these players feedbacks. After Mod 16 feedbacks, we all know what happened. So for once keep your promise and listen to your players, after you said you should have done that during Mod 16 preview.
The problem with the TOMM statistics is, that the content is designed in such a way, that it is more or less self-adjusting: Only dps with the highest damage output can successfully complete the dungeon. These are the dps included in the TOMM statistics. The average dps will not even appear in the statistics (normalized or raw). Essentially, in order to be included in a premade group (in subsequent runs), the other players will judge (from their first run with a new player), whether the new player's dps output comes close to the other dps in the group. If not, there will not be any subsequent runs for the player(s), who perform badly compared to the others, say at <=90% of the other dps. This is particularly important for a very tough dungeon such as TOMM, with several dps checks, that cannot be completed if the total dps is too low.
This means:
- weak classes with a low damage output simply will not be able to run TOMM successfully - weak classes will not show up in successful runs - even if they do (in low numbers), the players will be exceptionally skilled (top of her class), so that (s)he comes close to the average dps of the strong classes - people will quickly realize (within the first few runs, especially the unsuccessful ones) what the weak and strong classes are (on average) - the weak classes will not be included in (repeated, successful) runs, unless the player is exceptionally good - there will always be a couple of exceptional players (the top 5% percentile), that play a weak class VERY VERY WELL - these are the ONLY players of a weak class, that will be included in successful run - these players give rise to a statistical bias, e.g. they shift the low average numbers for the weak class up into the range of the other classes, so that the numbers in the TOMM statistics for a weak class ALWAYS come very close (within 10%) to the numbers of the other classes
To give an example: - Consider a fantasy rpg, where class A outputs ON AVERAGE 50% of the dps of class B (which is rated at 100%) - In order to successfully complete a dungeon, 90% of class B are required - The average player of class A has no chance to complete the dungeon, nor to be invited into runs that have a chance of success - There will be very few exceptional players of class A, that can output twice the average of A, e.g. are on par with the average player of class B (rated at 100%) - these players (and a couple more, that reach 90% of the average of class , will be included in the statistics for the successful dungeon runs. - from the statistics, it APPEARS as if class A has 90-100% percent of the Oomph of class B - in reality class A only has 50% of the Oomph
k, My 2 cents: Since I"m not a developer, I wouldn't know how to "class balance", however, what if we were given new enchantments specific to each class? Like for example a Bloodtheft type that gives an extra hit to clerics, or Fireball enchant that gives SW a dot burn with double the duration, or tanks a doubling of run or attack speed for 20 seconds. I don't know if reworking old content would be as quick a fix as this.
Everyone who plays the game knows that this data is wrong.
I will highlight some points:
1. End players tend to follow build guides for the best players in their class. These top players test equipment, teammates and everything in their power with numerous tests to maximize class damage based on ACT data.
2. Another factor weighing against this data is the number of offensive companions between the classes. Tell me how an HR and TR are behind a GWF, having 3 slots for offensive teammates? With 3 offensive teammates they have + 10k Tamed Velociraptor Power, 8k Deepcrow Power and + 4% Batiri damage. But with my GWF I only have to choose one of these 3, I have to read that even with this disadvantage I can still do more damage than these classes.
3. I really don't care if my class is the top or last DPS in this rank, if there is a difference between the top and last of a maximum of 5% as you even wrote in the Mod 16 post. I would be happy, because there are currently classes giving more than 15% than mine and that's frustrating because I know I don't deserve to join a group for ToMM because I would be a "carried" as someone once told me in PE.
Where the fk do you get your number from?? Ask tomm groups if thew want to take a hellbringer or a dreadnought to a run. They are 30% behind in dps, not 2%. No wonder dps warlock is HAMSTER with a guy like this in charge
In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer.
Classes were changed in M16. By the time M19 comes around you may not have any players left that care about those paragons. I understand things take time but this is a ridiculously slow process on your end. It makes me wonder, are you guys in over your head or did you really just put on blinders during M16 preview when these classes were being called out as being abysmal for DPS?
When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
I assume you realize people will think the worst because every time you've uttered these words the worst has been the result? Anyone here remember when a certain dev (hint hint you) basically told the warlock community, "Hellbringer damage is on par with other classes and maybe you guys just neeed to git gud"?
With M19 we plan to take the next pass on scaling.
There's that dreaded timeline again. M19. You're really telling your console community, "hey just suffer through what you've been complaining about for another year and we'll be good!"
whatever content they're scaled down or up to, they remain capped on those ratings because they are scaled proportionally to the content.
Music to many people ears. Personally I don't care. I build for ToMM and that's the way I run everything. Not playing your scaling puzzle game nonsense.
There are other benefits coming with this next step of scaling that include even easier adjustments on content difficulty allowing us to tune faster and better.
Faster and better would be a good change from the slow and plodding process every change takes nowadays. Again, I question who'll still be around in a year to see it...
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mamalion1234Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,415Arc User
While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
First off, the scaling that was talked about for mod 19 sounds great. I'm tired of feeling like all the hard work, upgrades and farming to become BiS is thrown out the window when running scaled content. Players should not be punished for their progression and have to swap out gear depending on the content they run. I hope that this translates well and if so it will be a great implementation and make the experiences an overall better one.
As for the damage performances. No. Just no. I'm not sure where those numbers are drawn from but the majority of the playerbase know how each class performs, what might not had been taken into consideration with those numbers is what contributed to every class performance. There are a number of things that can alter dps at the moment: the broken Darkened Storyteller, Xuna companion, overall weaker players entering Tomm, no name a few. The top end players already finished Tomm and perhaps now we see the second tier of players entering the trial which evens out the dps if you have less experienced wizards running with fully maxed out fighters for an example. We all know that the flavor of this mod are the wizards, even if you aren't particularly knowledgable of the class you will perform well as opposed to other classes. You pick a fighter and expect to be somewhat keeping up with a wizard in dps? Good luck. We know you will stick to your data no matter what but the playerbase will say otherwise on this topic, but all in all the numbers don't mean much without context.
rickcase276Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,404Arc User
Yes I would be interested to know the exact damage output of each class/paragon, in relation to each other, in a sterile environment. So long as buffs and external factors affect each class/paragon the same then that would be the best way to know, but I am not certain that buffs and external factors do affect each class similarly, from what I can tell.
Sorry to say, man but using ToMM as a guide for how classes perform in this game is entirely wrong. Based on your numbers, the classes are already balanced. I mean +3% and -6% are very acceptable differences. Really.
I believe you're subtly making us all idiots for being unable to understand the game and unable to build characters like warlocks, clerics and fighters "the right way".
We really do not want to hear of your graphs, plots and anything else because it already sounds clearly that your sample data is wrong. You can have the best analysis ever cause if the data is wrong, the result of the analysis is wrong.
And all of this because you compare the non-experienced players with the most experienced players. I believe that if you want to truly balance something, you must put side by the side the most experienced players (see what builds they use and analyze the weakest or worthless skills, etc). Also I am not sure you took into consideration the weapon enchantments people use. This can also mess up your data.
If you really want to know which classes are powerful, just have a look which classes are used most often in ToMM (the successful runs!). It won't be hard, there are some groups of people consistently farming ToMM, just have a look at their composition. OK, we will spare you the effort: 1. Top used DPS classes: - Wizard (ideal ToMM party consists entirely of wizards) - Rogue - Ranger 2. Top Unused DPS classes - Warlock (in ToMM they are fine only as healers) - Barbarians
The others (Fighters, Clerics) are not DPS classes. They're good at tanking or healing only.
Viperion - DragonTribe guild. Playing Ranger/Paladin/Bard/Fighter.
While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.</blo
What a joke on thinking all the classes are that close together, its been proven time and time again, the percentile difference between classes at max potential are closer to 30-40% in some cases, lets take the rogue and the warlock... theres a 27% damage difference @ max potential in TOMM(mainly because of the soul puppet dying and not being able to keep soul inventure stacked) so where your getting 1.6% is madeup.
> @noworries#8859 said: > While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread. > > > Class Balance > > We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback). > > All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance. > > As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison. > > Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %* Arcanist +3% > > * Blademaster +1.8% > > * Warden +1.5% > > * Assassin -- > > * Hellbringer -1.6% > > * Dreadnaught -3% > > * Arbiter -6% > > > > It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game. > > Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool. > > There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
Those percentages are definitely wrong. I'm an end game ranger on pc (Neko-kun), and trust me wizards are a lot further ahead than that. I'm talking discrepancies close to 15-20%. Warden ranger is second best. Barbarian is absolutely horrid at single target damage so I have no idea where that figure is coming from. I've never even seen a barbarian make the paingiver charts in TOMM and I've probably run close to 300 finished runs by now. My assessment based on wizard damage is this: Wizards being number 1, Rangers -5%ish Rogues -8%ish Cleric -25% Barbarian/warlock/fighter I honestly don't know, probably close to -30% Wizards are by far and away, much more than 3%, the best single target dps.
I agree that assassin rogue/warden ranger are a good baseline. The other classes should be buffed up to the level of warden/assassin and arcanist "adjusted" down a bit.
While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
@noworries#8859 I do not think to be expert, but playing the Tr class since 6 years, I think I know her fairly well. I done ToMM I think more than 400 times, maybe more than 500 I don't remember it, and I'm sure the dps data you collected is incorrect. Always or almost always playing with top players, I assure you that the Cw's damages are well over 3% even with the same player ability, the difference is enormous. Consider that every rune of 6 or 7 dps there are always at least 4/6 cw or 4 cw 2 hr 1 tr, every run the best cw give me a detachment of about 100 million. Even if I played with personal dps artifacts, the extraction would still be around 60/80 million out of 280. We have a difference about 30%. We can put all the variables you want but between 3% and 30% I personally would look at the data well. I wish you run with us to see .... goodbye and good work
While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
And for Oathkeepers??? We are still left in the dust?
This makes sense, as I was so surprised in M16 that you could cap all offensive and defensive ratings in every class with no effort. You could tell this at M16 release so people could knew that was intended.
Lets see how it goes.
I'd like to know how this is done without spending $500.00 in one shot. I have 4 toons on xbox, and only one has the important stats for ToMM capped. Even that took 6 legendary comps, almost all r13-14 enchants, r14 bondings, r10-11 runestones, and the IL1010 comp gear. All my alts have have IL 1010, or 990 comp gear and are no where near ready for LoMM IMHO, let alone ToMM. How will these guys fare in M18???
If you read my post I was talking about mod 16, not mod 17 so the caps were 66K not 80K. And I was capped in every stat including defensive ones just putting the new companion gear
I couldn't hardly reach cap in M16 on the important stats, so my argument is still valid for both, and for future as well.
I've have asked numerous times to see builds so I can see how people are getting the numbers they have, and so far I see that 2 things are absolute musts:
1. r15 bondings 2. 1010 comp gear 3. augment of some sort 4. legendary comp for bonuses 5. start maxing other runestones 6. legendary mount 7. epic insignias minimum
Everything else can be trash and it wouldn't affect much.
While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
And for Oathkeepers??? We are still left in the dust?
> Can you tell us if all dps paragon will have 3 offensive slot. Right now Barb's and gf have 2 less. And tha data that barbarian are 1.2 % behind arcanist in single Target aka tomm runs with 2 offense slot less is not possible. As other are saying this data are way off to the one we see everyday when we run tomm.
I think all dps classes should have 3 offensive slots... When using a defensive tank 3... You should be able to change your teammates depending on the build
Tanks need 3 offensive slots too/ We can't hold aggro if we hit like little girls. 20 mag damage for oath strike is rubbish, and divinity cost of smite makes it less than desirable as a means of doing dps.
This surprised me incredibly a lot How is arcanist overperfoming when almost every dungeon I was, either assasin rogue and warden ranger were doubleing my dps? Wizard was nerfed and it's going again there. Have you compared thaumaturge to warden and assasin? In my past Tomm runs, me as arcanist, rogues always doubled and tripled my dps, even being at same power average and damage +% bonus items. @noworries#8859 Please do not forget arcanist is very bad at aoe and messing with its single dps build should at least improve its aoe portion; single target thaumaturge was sent to hell already.
9
mamalion1234Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,415Arc User
This surprised me incredibly a lot How is arcanist overperfoming when almost every dungeon I was, either assasin rogue and warden ranger were doubleing my dps? Wizard was nerfed and it's going again there. Have you compared thaumaturge to warden and assasin? In my past Tomm runs, me as arcanist, rogues always doubled and tripled my dps, even being at same power average and damage +% bonus items. @noworries#8859 Please do not forget arcanist is very bad at aoe and messing with its single dps build should at least improve its aoe portion; single target thaumaturge was sent to hell already.
if another arcanist does 2x your damage, what is the arcanist? good or bad?
This surprised me incredibly a lot How is arcanist overperfoming when almost every dungeon I was, either assasin rogue and warden ranger were doubleing my dps? Wizard was nerfed and it's going again there. Have you compared thaumaturge to warden and assasin? In my past Tomm runs, me as arcanist, rogues always doubled and tripled my dps, even being at same power average and damage +% bonus items. @noworries#8859 Please do not forget arcanist is very bad at aoe and messing with its single dps build should at least improve its aoe portion; single target thaumaturge was sent to hell already.
Please delete your post , your clearly not playing your class right. I suggest talking to other high-end wizards and making ajustments
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance.
Numbers without methodology are fairly worthless. If this is even a little part of what you are planning to base your balancing changes on, can you please share methodology for critique? I am sure there is a significant chunk of people here that understand statistics well to very well and there should be a sizeable group amongst those that are still able to critique politely
This surprised me incredibly a lot How is arcanist overperfoming when almost every dungeon I was, either assasin rogue and warden ranger were doubleing my dps? Wizard was nerfed and it's going again there. Have you compared thaumaturge to warden and assasin? In my past Tomm runs, me as arcanist, rogues always doubled and tripled my dps, even being at same power average and damage +% bonus items. @noworries#8859 Please do not forget arcanist is very bad at aoe and messing with its single dps build should at least improve its aoe portion; single target thaumaturge was sent to hell already.
Please delete your post , your clearly not playing your class right. I suggest talking to other high-end wizards and making ajustments
I know arcanist is one of the best single dps'ers in the game but performing better than assasin and warden? it ain't just me, many others think the same and playing right? well.. I follow @thefabricant guides so i think my rotation is the same and i am a good player, but i know my build isn't near his, specially in power and some pet bonuses; i speak for what I have experienced. Maybe he can share his points about that?
Ps My post is staying, its my experience so thats why i found surprising @noworries#8859 analysis
@noworries#8859 I understand you think wizards shouldn't be scared for Arcanist nerfs, but I do. And everyone should.
The main problem with the CW right now is that it overperformed in damage and maybe still does, so no one cares about it's flaws:
-Both paragon is the same if you want to DPS, just Arcanist has Arcane empowerment and at the moment, better proccing rates, so it's the better one. People will jump back and forth between the 2 paragon when the other gets nerfed as they did from Thaumaturge. -Arcane empowerment is either overpowered or a scourge to use, because you never want to take such a risk for an average result. It's glass-cannon bursting the boss, which if gets disrupted (like, boss knocks you or goes immune), your damage is just plain lost, but even if you succeed, you just jumped to the top of the aggro chart and have to wait and basically tank with the fragilest class in-game until the tank reliably gets back it's aggro. And sometimes they can't, because you still proccing into the boss after you stopped attacking or just they not prepared that 1 person would be stupid to burst them out of their aggro position. Or in extreme cases: Using Arcane Empowerment on Drufi can disrupt it's phases instantly jumping into the AoE attack before spamming up the ice walls to go behind. -We know that the team hates spamming procs and I don't like spamming procs either. They cause quite a lag with a lot of CW around, a ton of lingering niche bugs and patch notes to fix them sometimes just gets things worse or completely break builds. Certain behavioral changes just don't get mentioned at all in the notes making everyone confused. -And proccing things fast with auto-target abilities is not fun. -The class is riddled with bugs which affects the entire class balance. And when everyone had to change from Thaumaturge to Arcanist no one got a retrain token, because that was only a bugfix. And it's not about the reroll tokens (I have maybe 40 left or more), but the general dread opening up the patch notes and asking around when I feel my damage is not on-par with before. So it might start to be the same damage as everyone else at the start of the mod, but what happens months later? -I loved the old MoF but after mod16, it's just a husk of a paragon, which is a shame considering that I wanted Fireball to make it into the game (even if it does not damage your party members to death, which seems very noncanonical).
And my issue is that none of the problems will be solved by balancing the Arcanist's damage out fairly.
I would like to remind people to be respectful to one another when having discussions in threads. Attacking one another is the quickest way to get a thread closed.
The thread has gone very far off of the initial topic at this point. I am planning on making this final clarification post on both class balance and the information I provided earlier before moving on from those topics in this particular thread.
The data shown was normalized data for ToMM runs on the PC over ~1 month. Normalized means extreme outliers were discounted to give a cleaner comparison. It does not show overall game balance, nor does it show the absolute maximum potential of any given class/path. That is also not the data used to make adjustments, wider data which includes more content and far more players is used to determine where game-wide balance is at.
There are issues with dps class balance and there are plans to address them. While I realize that hasn't happened on a time frame that either you or us would have liked it to, we are working towards getting that balance in a good place. The first goal is to make sure every class that has at least one dps paragon path, has a dps paragon path within 15% of target. The longer goal would be to have every dps class less than 10% off of target. As gear, powers, progression changes over time this will be a moving target that requires ongoing adjustments. The hope is to get it close to where it should be and then keep making minor adjustments to bring things even closer as well as to adjust for shifts from other game changes.
So where do the classes stand in our view on live currently?
Arcanist is over-performing by a decent amount
Warden is over-performing by a small amount
Assassin is currently at target
Blademaster is under-performing by a small amount
Hellbringer and Arbiter are under-performing by a decent amount
Dreadnought, Thaumaturge, Whisperknife, and Hunter are all under-performing by a significant amount
As was said before, Arcanist has some adjustments coming with M18 that will be available for testing out on preview when that happens.
Dreadnought and Hellbringer are slated for work in M19. We do have Arbiter, followed by the remaining paths as a stretch goal for the module and while hopefully we can get to them, we also want to set realistic expectations instead of calling out all of the things we'd like to get to and then following up by saying all of the things we weren't able to do.
Comments
P L A Y Y O U R G A M E
It's insane how little you know about how the classes actually perform, your TI-89 graphing calculator can't get you out of this one.
- Who were the players of each classes? We need to know if they know the class and play it well enough.
- Which classes using which items? Weapon enchantments like Bilethorn or Vorpal? What were the main artifacts? Which classes used debuff artifacts? Which ones self dps artifacts? If so are they Soul Sight Crystal, Decanter, Envenomed Journal or maybe broken Darkened Journal? What about belt neck set, everyone Demo set or something else? All of these affect dps by a lot.
- On these paths what were the chosen feats, class features and powers? On a class like Arcanist feat selections are really important.
- In how many runs have you gathered data? Were these runs all succesfull or did you count failed runs?
- On the runs how many dps players were there for each class? Was it 1 for each path like a rainbow team? Because for example Rouges share bleed, so if there are more than 1, its easier for them to do more damage.
These are the ones that came to my mind in 5 minutes. I am sure there are lots of information needs to be explained.
Whoever finished ToMM or even did a few decent runs can easily say that these numbers are far from being true. Either you are terrible at gathering data and making tests, so you failed so hard with these numbers or you are also aware of the huge gap between classes but you want to hide it and don't say it. I can't decide which one is worse.
We have been playing with this pure unbalanceness for 2 months. I hope you better do some balance for Mod18. Because people are really tired of seeing only Wizard, Rouge and Hunter dps being wanted. And I really hope this time you consider all of these players feedbacks. After Mod 16 feedbacks, we all know what happened. So for once keep your promise and listen to your players, after you said you should have done that during Mod 16 preview.
Essentially, in order to be included in a premade group (in subsequent runs), the other players will judge (from their first run with a new player), whether the new player's dps output comes close to the other dps in the group. If not, there will not be any subsequent runs for the player(s), who perform badly compared to the others, say at <=90% of the other dps. This is particularly important for a very tough dungeon such as TOMM, with several dps checks, that cannot be completed if the total dps is too low.
This means:
- weak classes with a low damage output simply will not be able to run TOMM successfully
- weak classes will not show up in successful runs
- even if they do (in low numbers), the players will be exceptionally skilled (top of her class), so that (s)he comes close to the average dps of the strong classes
- people will quickly realize (within the first few runs, especially the unsuccessful ones) what the weak and strong classes are (on average)
- the weak classes will not be included in (repeated, successful) runs, unless the player is exceptionally good
- there will always be a couple of exceptional players (the top 5% percentile), that play a weak class VERY VERY WELL
- these are the ONLY players of a weak class, that will be included in successful run
- these players give rise to a statistical bias, e.g. they shift the low average numbers for the weak class up into the range of the other classes, so that the numbers in the TOMM statistics for a weak class ALWAYS come very close (within 10%) to the numbers of the other classes
To give an example:
- Consider a fantasy rpg, where class A outputs ON AVERAGE 50% of the dps of class B (which is rated at 100%)
- In order to successfully complete a dungeon, 90% of class B are required
- The average player of class A has no chance to complete the dungeon, nor to be invited into runs that have a chance of success
- There will be very few exceptional players of class A, that can output twice the average of A, e.g. are on par with the average player of class B (rated at 100%)
- these players (and a couple more, that reach 90% of the average of class
- from the statistics, it APPEARS as if class A has 90-100% percent of the Oomph of class B
- in reality class A only has 50% of the Oomph
This is obviously, what is happening here
Since I"m not a developer, I wouldn't know how to "class balance", however, what if we were given new enchantments specific to each class?
Like for example a Bloodtheft type that gives an extra hit to clerics, or Fireball enchant that gives SW a dot burn with double the duration, or tanks a doubling of run or attack speed for 20 seconds.
I don't know if reworking old content would be as quick a fix as this.
I will highlight some points:
1. End players tend to follow build guides for the best players in their class. These top players test equipment, teammates and everything in their power with numerous tests to maximize class damage based on ACT data.
2. Another factor weighing against this data is the number of offensive companions between the classes. Tell me how an HR and TR are behind a GWF, having 3 slots for offensive teammates? With 3 offensive teammates they have + 10k Tamed Velociraptor Power, 8k Deepcrow Power and + 4% Batiri damage. But with my GWF I only have to choose one of these 3, I have to read that even with this disadvantage I can still do more damage than these classes.
3. I really don't care if my class is the top or last DPS in this rank, if there is a difference between the top and last of a maximum of 5% as you even wrote in the Mod 16 post. I would be happy, because there are currently classes giving more than 15% than mine and that's frustrating because I know I don't deserve to join a group for ToMM because I would be a "carried" as someone once told me in PE.
Sorry to say, man but using ToMM as a guide for how classes perform in this game is entirely wrong.
Based on your numbers, the classes are already balanced. I mean +3% and -6% are very acceptable differences. Really.
I believe you're subtly making us all idiots for being unable to understand the game and unable to build characters like warlocks, clerics and fighters "the right way".
We really do not want to hear of your graphs, plots and anything else because it already sounds clearly that your sample data is wrong. You can have the best analysis ever cause if the data is wrong, the result of the analysis is wrong.
And all of this because you compare the non-experienced players with the most experienced players. I believe that if you want to truly balance something, you must put side by the side the most experienced players (see what builds they use and analyze the weakest or worthless skills, etc).
Also I am not sure you took into consideration the weapon enchantments people use. This can also mess up your data.
If you really want to know which classes are powerful, just have a look which classes are used most often in ToMM (the successful runs!). It won't be hard, there are some groups of people consistently farming ToMM, just have a look at their composition.
OK, we will spare you the effort:
1. Top used DPS classes:
- Wizard (ideal ToMM party consists entirely of wizards)
- Rogue
- Ranger
2. Top Unused DPS classes
- Warlock (in ToMM they are fine only as healers)
- Barbarians
The others (Fighters, Clerics) are not DPS classes. They're good at tanking or healing only.
Viperion - DragonTribe guild.
Playing Ranger/Paladin/Bard/Fighter.
> While I am always hesitant to go off topic in a thread as it makes the information about the initial topic hard to find. In this case, at least so far, there doesn't seem to be any confusion about the information in the initial post, so I will briefly tackle the 2 main things being brought up here, but there likely won't be a lot of back and forth on those topics in this particular thread.
>
>
> Class Balance
>
> We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
>
> All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
>
> As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
>
> Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %* Arcanist +3%
>
> * Blademaster +1.8%
>
> * Warden +1.5%
>
> * Assassin --
>
> * Hellbringer -1.6%
>
> * Dreadnaught -3%
>
> * Arbiter -6%
>
>
>
> It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
>
> Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
>
> There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
Those percentages are definitely wrong. I'm an end game ranger on pc (Neko-kun), and trust me wizards are a lot further ahead than that. I'm talking discrepancies close to 15-20%. Warden ranger is second best. Barbarian is absolutely horrid at single target damage so I have no idea where that figure is coming from. I've never even seen a barbarian make the paingiver charts in TOMM and I've probably run close to 300 finished runs by now. My assessment based on wizard damage is this:
Wizards being number 1,
Rangers -5%ish
Rogues -8%ish
Cleric -25%
Barbarian/warlock/fighter I honestly don't know, probably close to -30%
Wizards are by far and away, much more than 3%, the best single target dps.
I agree that assassin rogue/warden ranger are a good baseline. The other classes should be buffed up to the level of warden/assassin and arcanist "adjusted" down a bit.
I do not think to be expert, but playing the Tr class since 6 years, I think I know her fairly well. I done ToMM I think more than 400 times, maybe more than 500 I don't remember it, and I'm sure the dps data you collected is incorrect.
Always or almost always playing with top players, I assure you that the Cw's damages are well over 3% even with the same player ability, the difference is enormous. Consider that every rune of 6 or 7 dps there are always at least 4/6 cw or 4 cw 2 hr 1 tr, every run the best cw give me a detachment of about 100 million.
Even if I played with personal dps artifacts, the extraction would still be around 60/80 million out of 280. We have a difference about 30%. We can put all the variables you want but between 3% and 30% I personally would look at the data well.
I wish you run with us to see ....
goodbye and good work
*sorry for my bad english
I've have asked numerous times to see builds so I can see how people are getting the numbers they have, and so far I see that 2 things are absolute musts:
1. r15 bondings
2. 1010 comp gear
3. augment of some sort
4. legendary comp for bonuses
5. start maxing other runestones
6. legendary mount
7. epic insignias minimum
Everything else can be trash and it wouldn't affect much.
How is arcanist overperfoming when almost every dungeon I was, either assasin rogue and warden ranger were doubleing my dps? Wizard was nerfed and it's going again there. Have you compared thaumaturge to warden and assasin? In my past Tomm runs, me as arcanist, rogues always doubled and tripled my dps, even being at same power average and damage +% bonus items. @noworries#8859 Please do not forget arcanist is very bad at aoe and messing with its single dps build should at least improve its aoe portion; single target thaumaturge was sent to hell already.
Numbers without methodology are fairly worthless. If this is even a little part of what you are planning to base your balancing changes on, can you please share methodology for critique? I am sure there is a significant chunk of people here that understand statistics well to very well and there should be a sizeable group amongst those that are still able to critique politely
Ps My post is staying, its my experience so thats why i found surprising @noworries#8859 analysis
The main problem with the CW right now is that it overperformed in damage and maybe still does, so no one cares about it's flaws:
-Both paragon is the same if you want to DPS, just Arcanist has Arcane empowerment and at the moment, better proccing rates, so it's the better one. People will jump back and forth between the 2 paragon when the other gets nerfed as they did from Thaumaturge.
-Arcane empowerment is either overpowered or a scourge to use, because you never want to take such a risk for an average result. It's glass-cannon bursting the boss, which if gets disrupted (like, boss knocks you or goes immune), your damage is just plain lost, but even if you succeed, you just jumped to the top of the aggro chart and have to wait and basically tank with the fragilest class in-game until the tank reliably gets back it's aggro. And sometimes they can't, because you still proccing into the boss after you stopped attacking or just they not prepared that 1 person would be stupid to burst them out of their aggro position. Or in extreme cases: Using Arcane Empowerment on Drufi can disrupt it's phases instantly jumping into the AoE attack before spamming up the ice walls to go behind.
-We know that the team hates spamming procs and I don't like spamming procs either. They cause quite a lag with a lot of CW around, a ton of lingering niche bugs and patch notes to fix them sometimes just gets things worse or completely break builds. Certain behavioral changes just don't get mentioned at all in the notes making everyone confused.
-And proccing things fast with auto-target abilities is not fun.
-The class is riddled with bugs which affects the entire class balance. And when everyone had to change from Thaumaturge to Arcanist no one got a retrain token, because that was only a bugfix. And it's not about the reroll tokens (I have maybe 40 left or more), but the general dread opening up the patch notes and asking around when I feel my damage is not on-par with before. So it might start to be the same damage as everyone else at the start of the mod, but what happens months later?
-I loved the old MoF but after mod16, it's just a husk of a paragon, which is a shame considering that I wanted Fireball to make it into the game (even if it does not damage your party members to death, which seems very noncanonical).
And my issue is that none of the problems will be solved by balancing the Arcanist's damage out fairly.
The thread has gone very far off of the initial topic at this point. I am planning on making this final clarification post on both class balance and the information I provided earlier before moving on from those topics in this particular thread.
The data shown was normalized data for ToMM runs on the PC over ~1 month. Normalized means extreme outliers were discounted to give a cleaner comparison. It does not show overall game balance, nor does it show the absolute maximum potential of any given class/path. That is also not the data used to make adjustments, wider data which includes more content and far more players is used to determine where game-wide balance is at.
There are issues with dps class balance and there are plans to address them. While I realize that hasn't happened on a time frame that either you or us would have liked it to, we are working towards getting that balance in a good place. The first goal is to make sure every class that has at least one dps paragon path, has a dps paragon path within 15% of target. The longer goal would be to have every dps class less than 10% off of target. As gear, powers, progression changes over time this will be a moving target that requires ongoing adjustments. The hope is to get it close to where it should be and then keep making minor adjustments to bring things even closer as well as to adjust for shifts from other game changes.
So where do the classes stand in our view on live currently?
As was said before, Arcanist has some adjustments coming with M18 that will be available for testing out on preview when that happens.
Dreadnought and Hellbringer are slated for work in M19. We do have Arbiter, followed by the remaining paths as a stretch goal for the module and while hopefully we can get to them, we also want to set realistic expectations instead of calling out all of the things we'd like to get to and then following up by saying all of the things we weren't able to do.