[damycles]

So, I've got ideas. Specific ideas. Ideas on the design of multiplayer focused experiences that happen to encourage the creation of communities and cooperation for the sake of achieving ones goals.

SL2, it's a game alright. But it's also a primarily multiplayer one. One could even say it's a bit... massively multiplayer- I mean, as far as BYOND games go that is. Now, I think for the most part the systems that exist are mostly fine in a lot of ways but my issue is that in the current state of the game, optimized play (Something that people will always strive to do no matter how hard you try to stop them) encourages a playstyle that is largely self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Now, this'd be fine if this was a primarily single player experience but it ain't. This kind of thing lives or dies by the strength of the community behind it and honestly... hot take here but...

I just don't think it should be possible to solo this game.

Now, you may so to me, "Damycles, even if I did agree with you, how the fuck do you propose we make that work?"

Well thank you random strawman I just made because allow me to explain:

You redesign the class system to force people to choose a specialty.

Damage, Survivability, Utility.

You get to be really good at one, kind've okay at the other, not good at all at the third.

The way to implement this isn't going to be easy. Honestly, it's probably going to be the most difficult balance change this game would see to date.

Basically, instead of main classes being a decider of what kind of locked off abilities and stat bonuses you get, you have to pick a main role. DPS, Tank, Support. That role will give you access to various abilities that are locked off behind a the role restriction, and the stat boosts you'll get from each role will vary slightly, depending on which class you choose as your main class to at least account for the things you'll probably need for said class. I mean, alternatively we could just get rid of class based stat boosts entirely and honestly the meta will just figure itself out from there.

Now, these roles will dictate which classes you can put as your main class since some classes may be able to fit into multiple different categories whilst others will be explicitly designed for one category only.

The main thing that this design shift will really focus on is the fact that best in class abilities for Damage, Survivability, or Utility/Healing, will be locked behind the main role restriction.

You can still choose to subclass into something that isn't your main role for a little bit of that but it will be nowhere near as potent or effective as someone who is fully committing to the bit.

What this effectively means is that a lot more abilities are going to be locked off and restricted which, at first glance, seems like it will reduce build diversity, but honestly speaking may in fact make a lot more kinds of builds actually viable and classes overall a lot easier to balance in the future.

The main side effect of this however which I think will be the real reason this kind of change will be worth it is the shifted incentivization structure of the mechanics. If you're only good at one of the three pillars and are not allowed to be well rounded then you're going to need other players if you want to tackle more difficult content or go against others with some semblance of safety and assurance. In other words, it's going to force cooperation through mechanics. You can't solo dungeons anymore because you'll need someone to either take the heat for you or keep you alive through healing and support skills. For bosses in particular, you may in fact need a balanced party of all three roles. It is an existing type of structure used in a lot of RPGs but in my opinion it's used in a lot of RPGs because it works. By dividing up the responsibilities of battle into clearly designated roles then you are naturally going to have people gravitate towards each other as a means of filling in those roles.

The specifics are... a lot... and I don't have the comprehensive system knowledge to go into the weeds of it, but this isn't about the weeds really. This is more about a base design philosophy that can be used to further fix additional problems that may crop up as well as fixing some of the core issues with the current system. If you wanna talk about it in more detail with me I mean, I'm on Discord. Regardless, I hope you'll at least consider the idea.

[Shujin]

Random strawman here:
I actually like the aspect of having the possibility of being so strong at some point that you can indeed solo much of the content. Thats the nature of RPGs really.

However I personally just do not like the speed in which that is achieved way too fast to reach the ceiling, and making "Role Archetypes" the only thing viable for one character at a time, like in games like ff14 Tank/Healer/2 DPS, is massively getting in the way of class creativty. So no I am against it. its not worth the effort for the change that I do not really perceive as enhancing for the roleplay experience. Way too limiting in my opinion.

Instead I would like to see new hardcore dungeons for late game, that are just so much harder than the normal ones, that you usually want a team. The wastes sound like a good place where those could be. or special raid bosses, on Necromancer level, were also very hard to Solo.

Because let us look at dungeon now (minus the wastes):
-The max level of monster is 60, so pretty much on par with players with less passives.
-normal encounters have 2-3 Monsters 3-5 with blood soaked, meaning your full party even outnumbers the enemies, especially with youkai/mercs
-you have a lot of recovery options, to maintain your Hp/Fp alone with food. So you rarely run out of steam.

Its kinda obvious WHY these dungeons do not need more than 1 Person to Solo once they have proper gear and class setup. So if the content is simply getting harder, that problem will already get mended in an in my opinion more beneficial way. Have dungeons with higher levels and more mobs spawn in, and people will have suddenly a lot harder time and thats not hard to do
Some of the current 60 dungeons could have a deeper layer/Chaos version of themselves. Where you encounter more and stronger enemies and maybe new super bosses, rewarding with better chests or other special things.

I think that be funner and easier to code. though I am also one of the people that thinks that Roleplay games do not nessecairly need to be 100% balanced like PVP games, so my opinion differs from others.

[damycles]

To be clear, what I'm suggesting here isn't exactly rocket science. I mean, to be honest, it's kind've the standard for nearly every single primarily multiplayer game under the sun with the only exception being fighting games and some first person and third person shooters.

FFXIV, that's a great example
WoW and most other MMOs is another great example
Team Fortress 2 is also a thing that does this thing
Apex Goddamn Legends does this
League of Legends (Which people play for some reason) and Dota 2 do this
Runescape does it (In a sort of roundabout way since you can basically re-class on the fly but each of your combat styles you can re-class into has a different specified role)
Elder Scrolls Online does it


I'm just saying there is a reason game design has actually gone this way for the past few decades in regards to multiplayer games. This isn't just a fluke. Because here's the thing, balance in the classes isn't just about effecting how people interact with each other, it also effects on a fundamental level encounter design.

I'm just saying dev, you're gonna be saving yourself a lot of work when you're thinking of new bosses in the future and asking yourself how the hell am I supposed to balance this shit? If we make harder dungeons, how. In what way will they be harder? More enemies? Bigger Number? More Damage? All of the above? What kind of builds do you even balance for? Do you go for the topmost percentile? The average casual pve/pvp player? How the hell are you even going to challenge them? What gimmicks can you do and what even are your expectations of the playerbase's general abilities?

Yeah it's gonna decrease build diversity. But maybe... just hear me out... maybe that's fine. I'll be real with you. It's probably gonna be a more solid game overall by the end of it because it'll be a lot easier to keep in reign the bullshit that might arise from various class combinations with more restrictions in place.

Just adding more higher level content is a quick fix, sure, but it's not gonna solve any problems. And whilst this is definitely a lot more of an initial investment I can assure you once this is done you will save so much goddamn time just on the drawing board alone.




Now here's an even spicier take: You wanna really make people sweat about how to build their stuff whilst emphasizing intended main class playstyles more with minimal time investment recoding shit? Subclasses get half the amount of skill points. Do it, I dare ya'.