Ok I'll try to take a less, offensive stance here and hopefully get across my feelings on the topic.
Buffs
What do they do?
Buffs are meant to bolster or increase statistics possessed by characters in game.
What do I feel they should do.
I feel buffs impact in games should be noticeable, but not overwhelming. Having access to a buff should indeed be a benefit, but not something that is used or seen as an end all win all situation.
Do they do it?
Sadly no. At the current state, buffs are essentially largely too impacting. Having access to even mediocre buffs when compared against the same odds without buffs, provides and overwhelming sensation of hopelessness. This feeling results in decreases desire to attempt to continue with the task.
To me this seems very wrong. With or without buffs alone, there should still be the feeling that it's not a hopeless task, and with proper team work, strategy or even luck, a victory could still be achieved.
Why?
To be honest I'm not sure how or why this came about. I do know it's very complex, and a very old long standing problem. But in the end, I feel the largest reason is the lack of desire to even build into a self sufficient role as a Damage class or Tank / Crowd Control class. And like I said, the idea to me is foreign, every game I've played you were capable of performing your classes designed function regardless of the presence of a buff or not.
DPS can cause Damage
Tanks can Tank
Crowd Control can still be annoying
With the current weight of buffs from a clerics POV, people forego what makes their class function entirely as that role.
Champions not investing into AP buffs
Raiders not investing into Aspd/Mspd buffs
and so on.
So in conclusion on why it's not functioning properly, it's just the culmination of many reason, the largest being that clerics will always 1 up a class benefit, making it feel useless.
How are the distributed?
Vast majority of buffs, especially from today's point are provided from Clerics. Most builds do not utilize the self buffs.
This build choice is called a "war" build. By completely forgoing all self buffs and self sustention, players free up skill points for more active skills or more passive / proc'd skills. By doing this, they completely render themselves unable to perform fully on their own steam. Relying entirely on the buffs from a cleric.
So in summery, buffs are almost entirely distributed from Clerics, with a few alternatives.
How could it be fixed?
tough question, cause there's a lot of ways to do this, but what matters is the impact and outcome. Also factoring in the transition on how it's achieved.
What should be done for sure
- Lighten the impact buffs have in active play. They have too much weight currently.
What else could be done
- Increase the desire to become more self sufficient in terms of buffs.
this could be achieved via reducing the availability of buffs available to a cleric, or increasing the affect of group buffs from other sources.
- Change how the class trait buffs work.
Changing the weights of class trait buffs like Soldier AP buff to scale more effectively with STR, and slightly less so with CHA -from it's current state.
Example: -not an actual data ratio, just for visual purposes-
1 STR = 1 AP to soldier buff
1 CHA = 1 AP to soldier buff
This would mean that across the board, whether you are an offensive built Champion, or a champion that uses CHA to increase AoE debuffs etc, you will both gain the same benefit form the AP buff, and so would your party. This make the buff universal for all build choice, but still able to provide diversity with CHA builds in cases where you want more debuffs etc.
In summery this big issues with anything is
Impact: How hard does it hit the games economy.
Implementation: How smoothly could a transition be made, and at what pace could it be achieved.
Result: Does it change the situation to the better, or eve fix the situation entirely.
The buff system is indeed the defining feature of ROSE. It shouldn't be stripped to a useless point. However, having 1 class of 8 total be the sole provider of both buffs + healing support is far far too limiting for today's play style and expectations of the community.
In the end I would like to see all classes be self sufficient for their roles, with or without a clerics buffs, but still have noticeable impact when the healing support is added to the mix. And I feel clerics buffs should be a -back up- option, should your team lack a Champions AP buff or some other buff.
Edited by Feuer, 14 April 2014 - 06:26 PM.
