Ep 5 balance update discussion

[Gaylar]

I'm not sure how I feel about that change to Guard Stance Advance, or why they're even bothering to begin with.

If they buff the duration and damage to something like 20s/30%, it might "work", but Fury is still a far, far better choice. But padding numbers isn't really gonna fix the underlying problems with Guard Stance to begin with.

It's not a survivalist stance when everyone has access to MH and Automate, even though you need it to get both, and it only gives Striking based resistances. If anything Fury does the job better because you can't get hit by something that's already dead (ok, Sparzyles and Vol/Quartz/Cats' death animations are a thing, but you get my point).

It's not a tank stance because Fury does a far better job at generating aggro due to its much higher and consistent DPS, and Hunter as a whole, regardless of stance, has War Cry.

So where the hell does it fall?

Now what would be interesting to me (within the bounds of what I believe SEGA would do) is if they did that, and THEN did one of the following:

- Make War Brave only apply during Guard Stance, effectively cutting out a source of PP regen and +%damage against groups of enemies for Fury users, thereby potentially cutting down on the number of people who actually use War Cry and allowing GS users to "tank" groups of enemies and reap the benefits from doing so (you'd likely still be weaker than someone using Fury, but with the GS Advance buff active and at least 5 nearby mobs it wouldn't be much). Fury would still be better for bosses. This probably wouldn't fly with some people though and I personally don't care for it much either, I don't see a point in harming Hunter's overall DPS, but it would in a sense make GS the "tank" stance, since you'd actually benefit somewhat more from drawing hate (or rather, just resetting it).

or

-Restrict Massive Hunter to Guard Stance-only. Though I'm sure this would piss off a metric fuckload of people.

Alternatively, dump GS Advance and give GS a hate mod that stacks with War Cry and add some kind of "increase damage based on aggro generated", up to a certain limit, that decays overtime.

But in all honesty, they're very likely not going to do any of this, they're more likely to just try and pad the damn thing with higher numbers and hope its fixed.

[BlueCast Boy]

I'm not sure how I feel about that change to Guard Stance Advance, or why they're even bothering to begin with.

If they buff the duration and damage to something like 20s/30%, it might "work", but Fury is still a far, far better choice. But padding numbers isn't really gonna fix the underlying problems with Guard Stance to begin with.

It's not a survivalist stance when everyone has access to MH and Automate, even though you need it to get both, and it only gives Striking based resistances. If anything Fury does the job better because you can't get hit by something that's already dead (ok, Sparzyle's and Vol/Quartz/Cats' death animations are a thing, but you get my point).

It's not a tank stance because Fury does a far better job at generating aggro due to its much higher and consistent DPS, and Hunter as a whole, regardless of stance, has War Cry.

So where the hell does it fall?

Now what would be interesting to me (within the bounds of what I believe SEGA would do) is if they did that, and THEN did one of the following:

- Make War Brave only apply during Guard Stance, effectively cutting out a source of PP regen and +%damage against groups of enemies for Fury users, thereby potentially cutting down on the number of people who actually use War Cry and allowing GS users to "tank" groups of enemies and reap the benefits from doing so (you'd likely still be weaker than someone using Fury, but with the GS Advance buff active and at least 5 nearby mobs it wouldn't be much). Fury would still be better for bosses. This probably wouldn't fly with some people though and I personally don't care for it much either, I don't see a point in harming Hunter's overall DPS, but it would in a sense make GS the "tank" stance, since you'd actually benefit somewhat more from drawing hate (or rather, just resetting it).

or

-Restrict Massive Hunter to Guard Stance-only. Though I'm sure this would piss off a metric fuckload of people.

Alternatively, dump GS Advance and give GS a hate mod that stacks with War Cry and add some kind of "increase damage based on aggro generated", up to a certain limit, that decays overtime.

But in all honesty, they're very likely not going to do any of this, they're more likely to just try and pad the damn thing with higher numbers and hope its fixed.

Either to fix Guard Stance Section is it give a new skill that focus on that stance or nerf Fury Stance which by receiving more damage by 10% at max...

Honestly its a decent balance adjustment but need more effort, I fear that all class would be inferior to Hero Class.

[Xaelouse]

They're bothering because they see every other melee class have a stronger more situational stance, so why not Hunter? They're basically gonna turn it into a stance that rewards you for playing Hunter main correctly on the right bosses.
You can easily fit guard stance+advance along with max fury on a build anyway for a tree dedicated to raid bosses.

[Ryuhou]

They're killing Gunner. Again.

Wut? Gunner gets a huge buff. It's no longer the oneshot bosses subclass and on main it can no longer do absurd damage with chain but that is perfect, SEGA is cleaning up the classes and nerfing all the incredibly gamebreaking burst damage skills. Hopefully PSO2 endgame won't be as much of a pitiful joke anymore as it is at the moment.
Dealing millions and millions of damage with a single skill is dumb as hell when enemies have ho this low. In other online rpgs where players can do this kind of damage bosses and mobs have appropriate HP but not in PSO2, making it harder to kill bosses will greatly improve the game. We may even start to care about boss fights again.

TBH a real tank would ruin the game. Aggro is mandatory for dealing damage, you need aggro to deal damage and then you need to keep dealing it to keep aggro. If you have a really bad ping (like me) you get almost no aggro and most classes suffer a lot from it, fi is rarely getting a stance boost outside boss eqs (since enemies and players move around a lot, Wise Stance is just as unreliable as Brave Stance), all melee and Gu need to be close to deal damage so you have to continuously chase after enemies and bosses who always run off hutning other players.
Even Force suffers cause Ragrants becomes a lot less useful. And bosses that move fast and far like Chrome or Mother hands can easily dodge your burst damage, not to mention chain because incredibly unreliable and frustrating.
If we had a real tank class, everyone else in the mpa would ahve this problem and mpa damage would be far lower.

But what could be good for a tanky hunter would be high survivbaility and disregarding aggro management. Since a full tank is useless even without fucking up everyone's damage and a lack of Fury Stance means contributing very little to the mpa, what is needed is a good amount of higher survivbaility than what you can get with Fury Stance but still about half the damage boost. But at the moment tank skills cost a lot of SP and are only really good in bulk, but if you commit so many SP to them you can no longer afford any damage boost skills like JA boost. Unless this gets fixed Guard Stance Hunter will remain borderline leech.

Either to fix Guard Stance Section is it give a new skill that focus on that stance or nerf Fury Stance which by receiving more damage by 10% at max...

Honestly its a decent balance adjustment but need more effort, I fear that all class would be inferior to Hero Class.

Why?
So far nothing has suggested it will be truly op. As a new class it will of course be kind of op at first for the hype period and then get nerfed to be sort of balance once the hype died down, like all other classes.

[Kondibon]

They're bothering because they see every other melee class have a stronger more situational stance, so why not Hunter?

You mean the stronger more situational stances people still barely ever use?

[isCasted]

I wish they removed or replaced stances entirely. They're more of an annoyance than anything else. Current skill tree system encourages speccing into once stance instead of switching between them, which is what's implied by the concept of stances. Stances themselves are boring conditional multipliers which don't change the way people play. Fighter's stances often act as a damage randomizer. Braver's stances force you to pick one based on weapons you want to use. Bouncer's stances are straight up nonsense and aren't even opposites.

Hunter's stances conceptually are the only ones that could potentially be fun to play with, because it'd be up to players to get creative with their use rather than have enemies dictate the "correct" one, but there still would have to be massive mechanical differences between the two (not just "boost damage by X%/reduce incoming damage by Y% but rather something that affects character interaction with enemies, like Automate/MH, even better - alter the way PAs work to some degree).

[Vatallus]

I want to play Hero, but because this is Sega the idea of Hero scares me. How are they going to screw up the skill tree? Is it going to be viable to play Sword and TMG Hero? Are we going to be forced to spec into only one only weapon type because of the skill tree?

I want to play Hero, but with how our skill trees have been I'm afraid they will screw with up too.

[final_attack]

I want to play Hero, but because this is Sega the idea of Hero scares me. How are they going to screw up the skill tree? Is it going to be viable to play Sword and TMG Hero? Are we going to be forced to spec into only one only weapon type because of the skill tree?

I want to play Hero, but with how our skill trees have been I'm afraid they will screw with up too.

We'll just have to see once it's implemented (I personally wanna try looking if setting up Tmg > Talis > Sword is viable)
I do wonder how the mechanic will be ..... Focus on 1, less performance for 2 others ....... or apply something that'll kinda balance / buff non-spec'ed attack stat ......
Since my main unit geared toward Gu use (R-Atk based) :<

Though I'm happy my main unit set used Apprentice and Modulator (thinking about Resta's heal power when playing GuHu, so, I chose those 2 ability to boost heal power). Too bad no Ability3 (chose Alter for HP boost).
But, shouldn't fell behind too much for other attack stats, since there's also unit's attack stats like SignRed and Union.

[Zephyrion]

I wish they removed or replaced stances entirely. They're more of an annoyance than anything else. Current skill tree system encourages speccing into once stance instead of switching between them, which is what's implied by the concept of stances. Stances themselves are boring conditional multipliers which don't change the way people play. Fighter's stances often act as a damage randomizer. Braver's stances force you to pick one based on weapons you want to use. Bouncer's stances are straight up nonsense and aren't even opposites.

Hunter's stances conceptually are the only ones that could potentially be fun to play with, because it'd be up to players to get creative with their use rather than have enemies dictate the "correct" one, but there still would have to be massive mechanical differences between the two (not just "boost damage by X%/reduce incoming damage by Y% but rather something that affects character interaction with enemies, like Automate/MH, even better - alter the way PAs work to some degree).

I actually like the stance system in itself. What bugs me is their inherent cost : for a vast majority of the classes, you have a lot of builds that make it impossible to get both stances at the same time, which is kind of hilarious considering their very concept is supposed to encourage switching them at will to face x situation. any given stance and substance skill should amount to 20 points maximum, and not 30 like it does for a vast majority of the cases.

[Kondibon]

I want to play Hero, but because this is Sega the idea of Hero scares me. How are they going to screw up the skill tree? Is it going to be viable to play Sword and TMG Hero? Are we going to be forced to spec into only one only weapon type because of the skill tree?

I want to play Hero, but with how our skill trees have been I'm afraid they will screw with up too.

I'm actually kinda expecting it to end up like Su, where everything is viable depending on the situation. Other than Marron and Mellon Su had some of the best internal balance in the game as far as PA choices go. That might actually be part of why they don't want Hero to have a sub.

I actually like the stance system in itself. What bugs me is their inherent cost : for a vast majority of the classes, you have a lot of builds that make it impossible to get both stances at the same time, which is kind of hilarious considering their very concept is supposed to encourage switching them at will to face x situation. any given stance and substance skill should amount to 20 points maximum, and not 30 like it does for a vast majority of the cases.

I forgot to respond to this, because I agree. I think the stances would be better if they were consolidated into single skills that gave both stances, and the stance ups just got removed. :/