Just curious, but how do you know this? I always assumed the balance team worked more on gut feeling than anything else.
Well, although the balancing is imperfect, they do in fact do very small tweaks to make sure that every class has different viable options, not just one weapon that is clearly the best. Like the things they did with 2h, I do not say that they were all good, but they seemed to be doing very small balance tweaks to balance strong weapons with other weapons. Imperfect as their efforts may be, the intention looks like tweaking to make every weapon comparably viable.
Just curious, but how do you know this? I always assumed the balance team worked more on gut feeling than anything else.
You make a persuasive argument teeth, but I'm still not completely convinced. I still disagree with talking about class balance from an individuals perspective. According to your scenario in a perfectly balanced cRPG the lances should perform equally well as the 2h cav weapons. In reality that just isn't the case, you'd presumably call this bad balance. I call this polearms having the advantage of weapon variety. Same thing with pikes/hoplites vs mauls. And that's why 2hs deserve the advantage of having the best dueling weapons. It's compensation for their lack of effectiveness in other areas. Sure that's doesn't help the guy with a poleaxe facing a greatsword, but that does help the class when it's not about an individual. As soon as you add more people to the equation it becomes balanced. 2hs have advantages in one area, polearms in others, averaging out to "balanced"
Your view of internal and class balance is certainly interesting and in a perfect world it might actually work. In reality it just has to many flaws to a be a practical approach to balancing. As an example how would you ever balance the lances vs 2h cav weapons? I can't see a way to ever achieve a good balance between those 2. In your view that's unbalanced, in my view it's fine as long as 2hs are compensated in some other area. It might be unbalanced from an individuals perspective, but not from a class (as in lot's of people) perspective.
Thanks for having read the wall of text attentively, appreciate it.
They way I described I think balance works is ideal which is not feasible to fully realise and there are actually exceptions, but I couldn't write that all out. I do indeed think that 2h should be as viable as lancer cav and so on. I disagree with you that when one class is strongest in a certain weapon type, it is okay because a different weapon type is weaker. I'd rather have all weapons to be equally viable. But I guess that is just a point we'll have to agree to disagree on.
