So you're telling me..

[ssunny2008]

SE doesn't balance classes on difficulty to play, in fact not many game devs balance on difficulty to play. Years playing mobas have taught me that the difficulty of a hero/champ/avatar doesn't equate to higher performance. Though more difficult classes can have higher performance potential, it's not always the case. Perhaps you could argue that it should, and some part of me would agree with you. After all, I mained BLM for SB and ShB and I did love playing BLM and it's difficulty made it a good challenge for me, and I love the BD dps numbers. But after playing BLM for so long, the difficulty of pulling big numbers became dependent on fight knowledge and just it kinda got... easy after that.

RPR is by no means the hardest job to play, but I don't agree that because it doesn't have a high skill requirement that it should be the lowest DPS. But we could argue all day about skill requirements and what seems fair for DPS, but ultimately I defer to SE's balancing.

Personally, I find RPR to be the most balanced gameplay wise. Also, who's to say the reason RPR feels "easy" is because it was simplified alongside MNK and others? Or at the very least it was designed this way precisely because everything else got simplified. IIRC, yoshi-p stated that RPR was meant to be on par with SAM.

Any serious gaming-company will keep "difficulty to execute" somehow in mind for the reasons i´ve already stated: "The average player", "More efford = more reward"

Classes with a higher skill-floor need some space, otherwise "no-expert players" would always underperform an so they gonna rely on easy champs as safer pick. This would make the class somehow "wasted" in its potential and design. Just check out my example on ff.logs. Top RPR and top DRG aren´t so hard away from each other. But DRG is definately harder to execute for a lot of reasons. The further you go down with the percentiles, the bigger the gap will become. And not only to DRG, to any class.
This will automatically lead to the issue one of the following issues:

- If the content is balanced around the top aka RPR / MNK, the most players gonna have trouble to beat the DPS checks unless they stay with RPR or MNK.
or
- If the content is balanced around the average DRG / NIN, RPR and MNK gonna be "easy-mode" for good and expert-players.

We can´t do anything else but keeping class-difficulty in mind and the actual stats speak for themselves. Yes, my inner voice is like "I don´t want to see broken and easy to play stuff at the top.", but just look at the stats, scroll through the stuff on ff.logs. Everything is alerting when we just look completely objective on RPR. MNK and yes, even SAM just follow him.

And i´m pretty sure SE keeps difficulty in mind, just look at the RDPS classes. I highly doubt the next patch will bring them in line or on the top with melees. SMN is easy to execute too now and stucks with them. Don´t know if SE just fckd it up, but in kind of difficulty? Absolutely reasonable to pay an "easy to play / range tax".

I don´t know what you actually mean with "RPR is the most balanced gameplay-wise".


And seriously MOBA´s can´t be counted. I´ve played LoL for years too.

1. PvP and PvE balance work way different.
2. MOBA´s have to mix up their meta again and again to keep things fresh. In MMORPG´s, it´s the boss-content. In MOBA´s the characters are the content.
3. Obviously, atleast 90% of all time, the champs got buffed, which surprisingly became a new skin. And obviously mainstream champions recieved the most skins and are mostly meta.
4. It´s a matter of items. While MMORPG´s have some gear, such gear is mostly shared and / or has atleast similar stats. But items in MOBA´s are there to either counter enemy-abilities or to leave the player the possibility to adjust (crit, flat, tank, support-builds). Of course "BIS" exists too, but it´s not always the best option. There is way more strategy involved based on the enemies, your own teamcomp and how the game is going on.
5. The balance measures around early-, mid- and lategame aswell.

Don´t know if i forgot something at the moment, but it´s definately not comparable. And some form of "harder to execute = more reward" balancing exists there too. Lee Sin and Yasuo, even Bard are the perfect examples.