by Bloggorus on Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:56 am
I think we;ve got to a point in the beta where the devs are happy enough that classes are relatively balanced in their difficulty of use in all dungeons.
They will never be COMPLETELY balanced; that would be like balancing Starcraft with eighteen factions instead of three, and everyone agrees that balancing those three was very impressive.
The main issue is that in scenarios like the Tower, tiny differences in survivability between classes gets magnified by a thousand.
For example, the difference in a regular dungeon might be that a warlord has a few extra attacks and potions left over after killing the boss, whereas a tinker has gone down to the wire. In the Tower, you have to fight a hundred bosses, and those tiny differences add up very quickly.
This is okay in the regular game, because you can recognize a hard combination of dungeon and class and just get better.
I'm not sure if the devs have commented on this, but they seem completely opposed to any kind of dynamic difficulty.
They like their mismatched dungeons, they provide variety, and it seems they've been committed to that for a long time. I also like this approach, so maybe I'm biased, but a lot of the recent changes have been made to highlight the built-in 'dynamic difficulty' of using mismatched classes through the PQI.
Using the Tower as reason for balancing the game is a little like using an atomic clock to tell your sundail is a bit slow; it's true, but it't not really applicable.