Class roles and balancing parties

So one thing about Nexus in the past was that some roles didnt fit as well into parties as others did. I am thinking if each class were somewhat layed out in terms of what you want to accomplish with it, it may be easier to take the classes where you want them to go that way.

Priest is obviously the primary healing class.

Fighter is your primary tank, they had the best tanking ability in parry and you could afford to dump all your stats into Con because your damage was mostly reliant on weaponskill so you could easily amass large stamina and health pools.

Wizard and Ranger are you primary ranged DPS. You can argue that some rangers melee, but once they added snipe…you pretty much just used missile because snipe was retardly good.

Thief and Barbarian are you primary melee DPS classes. In most situations Barbarian was also your second best tanking option since they had the most stamina in the game and had taunting options. Barbarians had to dump a lot of points in strength to be supereffective in damage which usually left their health pools a little low.

I think thieves could actually use a little love, once rangers got snipe, they could do comparable damage with no risk of death and then haste to do more damage. I think thieves could at least use a damage increase for after a backstab, maybe poisons or something?

Now the other classes were a little trickier.

Paladins were a great secondary healer and in some situations also the second best tanking class. I think paladins are ultimately the hardest class to balance. Healing classes are definately necessary to a party. They are great single target tanks since they have high health pools and can heal themselves, the only problem before was they didn’t have a taunt so you had to rely on a stun device or fight undead so you could turn if u wanted to tank. I am not sure if adding a taunt ability to them would be too strong though.

Bards were a great secondary healer and great support for casters because of the mana regen song. They could probably use a little love though. Maybe add some kind of song to boost melee so they weren’t in this kind of situation where they are always best paired with a mage. I mean Im sure it gets old playing the same one song 99% of the time.

Monks were maybe in the worst spot in the game in terms of group dynamic. They didn’t bring anything to the group that another class couldn’t bring better. They had utility in being able cast resists and could self heal some, but their best role was probably to offtank, but they needed to get to a high enough level to have the passive armor and then they had to use a stun device to pull aggro. I think at the very least monks need an aggro gaining ability besides touch of death. Something on a reasonable cooldown that doesnt put them at risk of getting vitaled to death on a failed one. That said, they were a really good solo class, but ultimately you want to be able to get into parties.

I guess the point of this post is for big dangerous hunts i almost always wanted a priest. Otherwise things could get hairy. It was def fine to bring a bard or paladin to solo heal a small group of 2 or 3 but once you exceeded 5 ppl a priest was damn near mandatory.

Moving forward do we want to keep that dynamic of needing a priest? I think perhaps buffing bards healing to the point of being a near viable primary healer could go a long way towards building groups witha small playerbase. I dont see a real good way to buff their damage to balance them so buffing their healing would prob be the best route to help them out.

I think we could use another viable primary tank besides fighter. I think Monk would actually be the best choice since they have the least defined role. Add in a dodge ability like the fighter parry suggestion and that would provide extra mitigation. Perhaps they get damage reduction for a brief period after meditate so they would have a nice “Oh shit” button. Add in a reliable taunt and you could have a good tank, especially once they get their magic resistance, they could be better tanks than fighters in situations with caster mobs.

And while you say barbarians should be the secondary tanking class! With berserking all the time and not being able to see their stamina and low health pools for vitals, I think that relegating them more to an offtank role and prioritizing their DPS role would be a fine direction for that class. One thing I think would be really badass for barbarians would be to have a small % chance, maybe 10% to shrug off death after a lethal hit while berserking, leaving them at 1 health. Could give you a window to heal or teleport out.