It’s more like a thought experiment, may be it will come as an interesting discussion.
Before getting to it, I’ll be assuming a few things: that FS posses a way to collect and datamine statistical data like amount of damage various players do at all difficulty levels, amount of damage they can tank per second, things like these. With enough details allowing them to do splits by class, specific talents used in their builds, see what percentage of this damage was contributed by what talent or bless, etc. By not allowing too much of min-maxing, we also ensure that each class will have its own niche and distinct features, making playing as each more unique.
Then we could use next approach to balancing it all:
- For each class, we define its general “gist”, lets say. Ogryns are best tanks and melee fighters, which can apply a lot of stagger. Zealots are second in melee to ogryns, still can apply a lot of damage, but not that much stagger; they lack in range capabilities though. Veterans are best out of all classes in range fights, but mediocre in melee etc
- Depending on those “gists” for each of the classes we set max limits to all core metrics: melee/range dps (and how much it can scale, to set limit to maximum possible AoE damage), amount of toughness/stamina generated per second, total amount of toughness/stamina, things like this.
- Min/maxing is still possible to a certain extent, but if somebody tries to bend the system too much, the metric they tried to maximize hits its limits for this class - and though further its increases still will be growing it, those extras will be times and times smaller than before the limits is reached. Like, if you had to spend 3 talent points to increase your damage output by 20% before it hit the limit, now you would need to spend 6 more points for extra 10%
- So now we know how much DPS and toughness regen each class can do (max) almost precisely - and can balance HP mobs have, damage they do, what stagger resist they have, density of hoards etc for each difficulty level based on some very good estimations of what players can do with those classes. We are sure that nobody will be able to create insanely-unbalanced build that will screw all our balancing efforts. We also incentivize more variety in building by making creation of “glass cannon” builds impractical past certain extent - so people will spend those points on some QoL or support talents instead
- Using the datamining capabilities I mentioned before, we constantly evaluate how players are doing, and adjust all those metrics if they don’t reach our intended goals. Like, if you see that players now fail too many mission at Damnation, we pull all the data, see what are players vs mobs damage outputs are there, what is average lifetime players have there, are there specific builds (specific talents, weapons and blesses combos) that are especially vulnerable, and some others that are doing well (or too well) - and re-adjust limits if needed, or change some talents/blesses if they seem to be a huge factor in what happens.
So, if something like that could be implemented, instead of blindly tweaking various metrics based on inconsistent feedback provided by some minorities of players who care enough to go to some forums, FS could actually do some educated guesses and try to solve problems that really exist. We also could finally stop the endless race for maximizing damage and toughness regen and make people take other blesses and talents - increasing builds’ variety.
What do you think?