Bashing and Professions

Khizan

Jesse said:

Ask and ye shall receive. 

Well, since you put it that way, I'd really like if if you could take another look at bashing damage and speeds throughout the game, but at the high end of things this time. 

Bashing is hugely important in Imperian, because it affects so many things. It's required to level and get the health to fight. For many people, it's how they get the skills to fight. It's how you turn cults into sects, and it's how sects build temples and learn rituals. And then, after the sect has learned the ritual group, it's how the sect members learn the actual rituals. It's how you make gold. And it's a good time-filler. Nothing to do? Go crank out a  few areas, take a novice along. 

And so, with bashing so important, why is there such a vast discrepancy between the capabilties of various classes? Khizan the Intelligent Summoner, with a L2 collar/sash and a Diadem, puts out 51 DPS. Khizan the Strong Defiler, with a L2 flail and L1 gauntlets, puts out 32 DPS. I have more artifacts for summoner, yes, but not enough of them to justify one profession bashing at 60% the capability of the other. And that argument is further destroyed by Athletic Cleric Rumal putting out 51 DPS with just a L1 mace, putting out Khizan level damage with barely any artifacts at all.

With bashing so important, this damage difference makes me feel locked into certain professions. If I die in a shardfall and have to replace faith, being a defiler means I replace faith at 60% of the rate I'd replace it as a Summoner. If I want to go bashing, but I'm in Strong, I'm going to be 40% slower and gain less than if I were in Summoner. Accordingly, this means that I spend most of my time as a Summoner. My other professions are interesting and I'd like to play with them more, but if I lock myself into a Defiler/Deathknight statpack, I am l locking myself into an enormous bashing penalty, and that's just not worth it. I actually find myself less willing to consider other professions for just this reason. Why pick up another profession when I'm just going to be in Summoner for the bashing 90% of the time?

The ones I really feel sorry for, though, are the newbies who pick up these sub-par bashing classes without knowing what they're in for. "Oh, hey, yeah, that's an awesome and interesting and fun profession for PvP, but you'll spend way way way more time bashing than PvPing and it's garbage at bashing. Have fun on your way to aspect at 30 DPS."

I've waffled about posting this for a while, because I've been afraid that you'll solve this problem by making Summoner hunt at the same speed as defiler instead of by buffing defiler. But lowering all the high end classes would make things suck more for Clerics and Predators, both of which are ridiculously huge outliers as well, so I guess I could live with that, too.

Jesse

I'd love to be able to go back and revisit this project. It's not in the plans right now as far as I'm aware, and I'm not sure if Garryn has any plans for bashing balancing in this round of classleads.

Hopefully there will be some room to work on this after Garryn finishes classleads and we get caught up with all of the other work we have planned.