What still cracks me up, that players take refugee from ranged on "SIEGE", the place where logicly seen ranged should have, but doesnt have, more advantages. Instead they have more advantages on "open" maps not on maps with more "stationary" covers as they are mostly used now by melee ^^.
The argument that people block too well, there could be something to it, perhaps blocking needs to be made more difficult(waiting for shitstorm ^^).
The skill to block as shielder, low in comparison to 4 directional block, as then but most 2h/pole became sufficent proficient to block nearly everything anytime, then the advantage of the shielder is gone. So when people say easy block towards shielders ... sure, but it doesnt give an advantage anymore as it did perhaps 2 to 3 years ago. But with my argument above, if blocking is made thougher, it should be made tougher on all of us. Then again doing so, may fuck up things even more, as people may wonder then .. why the hell is blocking now not working anymore ...
... retiring to 1h/xbow/cav ... more and more sounds like an option or why would i keep arguing against something which devs clearly dont see as a problem. Sure the game is getting old, but before the respec the gradual increase of ranged was already there, only afterward it but became obvious and now Paul you seem to want to ignore the fact, that that actually then is discurraging lots of players ... the other reason would be that the respec for some went to shit as they respeced into something they didnt like ... for that argument we but would need to see how many high level players have stopped playing or do less playing with a total different build, the later isnt realy my concern anyways.
One of the things i remember clearly chadz saying, "ranged are support classes". Support != dominating = majority of server population
Support != headshotting gattling guns (if only felt that way because of ranged amount of players or because the lower tier bow combined with high wpf, both being a problem)
In any case i would like to see
- Xbow penetration of shields => deleted, if not for all , then for expensive shields above 2500 gold or higher shieldskills of 5 to 6 or a combination of both.
- kick, area of effect, decreased by 2/3
- while i would keep the accuracy of bows, the argument about missile speed i see as viable, reducing the speed increasing the need to estemate more and reading more carefully the situations.
- increasing the weapons weigth effect on movement speed. If you are carrying this sick huge 2h/pole you should be slower.
- decreasing speed of lower tier bows
if you want to balance further
- decreasing munition count of all ranged, with lots of them online, there shouldnt be a problem with that, therefor but also may not have any effect
- reducing the weight penalties of shielders, may have the effect we are looking for but needs to be done carefully as that could leed to a shielder overdooze 0_o as would binding shield requirement to 'str' instead of shieldskill, which replaces one problem with another.
Then again, if you all just consider at least, quotas(indiviually gear based/ not a fixed class system). If they are implemented rather flexible, we still stay on track with individuality and players choice, but get a balancing tool. If then f.e. you have that in place, you can adjust those and every week there maybe a new combination , where either more ranged or less shielders or more 2h or less pole or more cav or less HA or or or would be doable ... creating rather uniq sets of teams again. But we all would need to play more often with alt characters. Aslong those then would be easily accessible when you try to join a server, this would be a good thing.