One thing I will say though Power fist/ healer combos vs. Eldar..... omg.... You have never had fun until you try that stuff out, they go flying like dc130s over Manhattan Anyway keep your heads up Eldarz, dem devz will make yaz op soon enuff
Truth be told, I've never seen a competitive game that was perfectly balanced - FPS included. In CS 1.6, grenades were kind of overpowered if you knew all the fancy throws / ricochets. Plus, you could shoot through walls in certain spots at common defensive spots - so that was bullshit. In Source, the deagle and AK were too accurate and powerful on their first shots - so the entire game became them at top end. In GO, all the guns had shit accuracy, so it was just a derpy spray-fest like Halo or some shit. In League and DotA, there are FOTM broken champions every single patch. So - it would best, IMO - for them to choose to try to be somewhat lore accurate - and then just be quick to buff / nerf things in small increments. The alternative, to pursue a misguided attempt at balance - would lead to the game not being asymmetric - which isn't what w40k is about, and isn't what we were sold on. I would gladly sacrifice some balance to gain some interesting-ness.
Agreed. I'm sure that bE would be happy to as well, it's just whether Games Workshop will allow them to break from lore in enough ways to get the balance they want. Edit: though what Yvaelle says above is also true. Some modicum of balance would be nice though. Something in the region of 33% win rate +/- 5% per faction.
I don't think overall winrate is a good means to buff/nerf - because in a game like this it becomes very community-dependent. What if the Orks develop a community culture of mobbing points together (one warboss calling out which target to swarm next) and relentlessly charging into battle, dying, respawning fast (because they are Orks and that should be how they are unique IMO), and then dying some more. They should be rewarded for that explosive / overwhelming / all-in playstyle - and in some games that is super-effective. What if the Eldar have bonus critical hit damage, and that attracts all the twitchy FPS kids because it's rewarding them for their mechanical skill, so the design of the classes attracts different sorts of people - and as a result there is a very real skill-gap between the Eldar players and their opponents in terms of aiming / headshotting. Nerfing them for being better is a road to damnation. What if all the armchair generals gravitate toward Space Marines, start John Madden'ing all the maps (posting strats online), and culturally the Space Marine community is expected to go through a boot camp of educational videos about each map (or they get shunned if they don't do it) - as a community they name their tactics and develop a battle cant of quick words to translate complex meaning (ex. strat calls in high end Counter-Strike, semi-exploitative wall jumps / grenade throws over roofs to hit common camping spots, etc). I bring this up because I've seen it many times in other games - where the problem isn't the classes at all - it's the community. Examples: In League, the Koreans are widely regarded as the best League players in the world - but the real reason this is true is because they, as a community, understand late game win conditions better than virtually every other regional community. Mechanically, there is no difference between top tier players in NA, EU, Korea, or China - if games end quickly enough - any team can win - but if a game drags on for over 35 minutes, the Korean team statistically has a correlated increased win rate. In World of Warcraft, the PvE Shadowpriest community has had - for the past ~8+ years - about a dozen masters and doctorates in maths, physics, or economics running their theorycraft (myself included). We invented the third party software that now all classes use to simulate raid dps, we're often incredibly thorough and in-depth - and as a result we find tricks and quirks of our class faster, we maximize our DPS better, and we communicate it to the Shadowpriest community better (which pulls up our community-wide DPS statistics). The WoW devs try to balance raid DPS across classes, because Shadow used to consistently outperform their internal testing - while Affliction Warlocks (as example) would often linger behind: so buff Aff. Locks and nerf Spriests. Except this doesn't really fix the problem, because it's the Shadowpriest community that is superior to the Aff. Lock community - it's not a class balance issue. Top locks were always competitive or often superior to top spriests (due to the dev's misguided balance strategy), but overall locks were behind - because new Spriests had a mountain of quality data to bring them up to speed, while new locks had to rely on their own learning and intuition. So I think as a game dev. you need to be really careful - that you are balancing the imbalanced classes (which obviously do exist) - but not punishing a faction for having superior tactics, a superior community, or superior players. If the Eldar develop a tactic of using Howling Grots to lure space marines outside of objectives - into the field of fire of waiting Rangers and Reapers - the solution isn't to nerf Reaper/Ranger damage: it's for the SM community to stop following the cheeky redhead into the sunlight.
Fair point well made. My only caveat being that 'fun' should always be the main focus of a game and if one side is consistently losing, for whatever reason, then that saps the fun for everyone and the game should be actively tweaked to increase the fun. We just need to not have kneejerk reactions to changes that haven't had time to properly settle and no 'squeaky wheel' fixes and we should be fine. The community can also aid this by not cherry-picking changes to complain about simply because they're more directly affected by some changes than others.
SO you're the one that turned WoW into a number game! Ima keep an eye out for you in game now! VENDETTA!!
In Warhammer Online I was also one of the jerks behind the Mathguard joke (we took one of the DPS Ork classes and brutally overanalzyed it until it did too much damage but wasn't fun)
