LATE NIGHT UPDATE: GORDON ON BEASTLORDS [Author: Snowspinner]
Quoth Me:
Caster’s Realm has parsed the spell file on the Test Server, and uncovered the latest product of the Verant’s Magical Wonder Crackpipe(tm), the Beastlord Spell List, which gives us the first real insight into what this class is all about.
Quoth Him.
One of these days we’re going to look into obscuring the spell file.
There’s a bit of contention on the team in that regards as in the past
people have, by virtue of that knowledge, brought potential issues to our
attention before if it had the opportunity to affect the game. Of course,
I’m sure the same argument could be made if we publicized the item database
which won’t happen:)
In this case though I’d have to say that it does more harm than good. That
is a very preliminary spell list and we won’t know how they play out in game
until we have a fair amount of play-testing done. There’s also the fact
that many of the spells use unique code specific to those spells. People
won’t really have an idea what they do until they observe the spells
first-hand. Not to mention, by it being more or less public we of course
have to deal with repetitive “Buff! Nerf! Buff! Nerf!” cycle that is
inevitable when we’re in the process of balancing the class.
Quoth me:
So what we’re faced with is a class that has the chance to be unbalancing gods, if their pets are at mage strength, their spells are as listed, and their melee capabilities are high. They’re also a class that has the opportunity to be complete gimps, if their pets are wimpy, their melee is mediocre, and they don’t get any roots or snares.
Quoth Him:
You know us: We’re not going to purposely put them in as “unbalancing gods”
any more than we’d purposefully put them in as “complete gimps”. I suspect
that it will be somewhere in the middle 🙂
-Gordon
_______________________________________
Gordon Wrinn
Associate Producer, EverQuest Live/Luclin
Sony Online Entertainment
www.everquest.com
And there you have it.