At a time when player activity and enthusiasm are already declining, I often hear players say they are quitting because of class imbalance.
At the GM’s request, I collected opinions from the chat groups of my guild, which has hundreds of players, and put them together to discuss the current damage imbalance in Arena.
Everything below is based on situations I have personally seen and opinions from many players I know.
Important:
All comparisons below assume the same gear quality and the same number of books.
I am tired of arguing about this issue, so I will not reply to any comments under this topic.
1. The Problem with Reaper
Over the past year, most of the class-balance complaints I have seen or heard have been about Reaper.
The current strength of this class is something most players have never seen before in all their years of playing Warspear.
First, under the right conditions, Reaper can kill almost any class with 1 hit, dealing over 10,000 damage with a single crit, or over 8,000 AOE damage.
Second, Reaper has an extremely high margin for error. It cannot be killed quickly, can sometimes be even harder to kill than a tank, and is also difficult to control. A Reaper can simply charge in and deal damage without worrying much about survival, because most of its defensive abilities work passively.
So why is this class so unbalanced? I think there are three main reasons.
First, Reaper has three damage multipliers: base skill damage, skill power, and crit-hit power.
These three multipliers stack multiplicatively, causing its damage to increase extremely fast. Other classes cannot make crit-hit power work in PvP like Reaper can. On top of that, Shaman can provide even more crit-hit power.
Second, Reaper has a unique damage reduction mechanic.
The damage it takes is delayed and dealt slowly over time. This means Reaper cannot be killed quickly and always has enough time to deal huge amounts of damage, while opponents have very few ways to stop it.
At the same time, this mechanic basically disables the opponent’s life steal. As a result, damage classes that depend on life steal for survival have almost no chance against Reaper.
Third, Reaper has too many passive abilities.
The class requires very little operation. It does not need to worry much about survival because it has a passive skill that protects it from control effects.Its key damage buffs are also constantly active. This means Reaper can spend almost all of its time simply attacking and dealing damage.
This brings us to another question:
Why was such an extreme class created in the first place?
That leads to the next problem.
3. The Unhealthy Arena Environment
One major reason Reaper became so strong is that some healing classes have extremely powerful sustained healing.At the same time, some tanks also have extremely high survivability.
To counter them, the developers increased Reaper’s damage to an extreme level, allowing it to kill enemies in a single hit.
Then, to make sure Reaper had enough time to deal this damage, its survivability was also greatly increased.
But this went too far.
The developers left Reaper with one small weakness: Mage’s ban skill can remove Reaper’s damage reduction.
However, this did not solve the problem.
This weakness did not have the expected effect. Instead, after round after round of balance changes, Reaper became even more extreme.
Eventually, a monster was created:
Extremely high damage gives Reaper extremely high life steal and HP recovery. Extremely high HP recovery combined with extremely high damage reduction makes the class almost impossible to defeat.
Many disappointed players have said the same thing:
“It feels like Reaper is playing a different game from the rest of us. The class feels like it has cheats.”
4. Suggestions for Balance Changes
After thinking about these problems, these are my suggestions:
Reduce the damage of damage classes, reduce the sustained healing of healing classes, and remove self-healing from tank classes. Make Arena fights last longer. Dying instantly creates a very bad gameplay experience.
Make Reaper’s “delayed death” skill impossible to remove with Mage’s ban skill, but make Reaper eventually take 100% of the delayed damage.
Increase the base skill damage multiplier after Reaper transforms, but remove its ability to deal critical damage.
Change Reaper’s passive control immunity into an active buff skill.
By
kios ·
