THE PROBLEM IN ALL MMOS - TANK SCARCITY & DUNGEON GROUPS

Let tanks build for either decent DPS or mitigation depending on gear sets so that more people can play them in PvP and less-traditional PvE situations.

Then sit back and watch people who enjoy being both survivable and doing 'good but not the best' damage, learn to tank if they don't already know how.

What if, and hear me out here, we had a "class statistic" when we were looking for a server to play on? So like, if Intrepid sticks to the "1 of each archetype parties" design goal, they could track how many of each archetype there is on the server (would probably have to be a "first character on the account" kind of tracker rather than a pure char one) and then advertise the imbalanced roles with some small text and maybe a video of some cool abilities from the archetype.

So when a new player wants to play, say, a bard - he can look for a server where there's not enough bards. Obviously there's a high chance that alts would be helping out with that issue, but I'd assume any group of people would be more happy to have a pure main archetype than making one of their members play a class they didn't want to play.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

If you got friends to play with - ya ain't got class problems.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

Could definitely account for lvl/activity too. And most likely even should, cause, as we both pointed out, there'll be cases of people playing on their alts instead of their mains.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

Unless that group of friends goes directly against the alleged design of "1 of each is optimal" - they'll just add number of people on the server rather than bring imbalance to the classes.

But even if we assume that it's not a full stack of people and they did go against that design - one (or even a few) group of friends is nothing in the face of the potential 10k players on the server.

But I think I get what you're saying, if people just choose servers w/o looking at the stats or caring about minmaxing their party (which will obviously be the case for quite a lot of people) - you'll get unbalanced servers. At least initially.

But I think that would be fine. Content will be mainly pushed by the minmaxers who will be in optimal stacks (so theoretically "1 of each"). All the other people will just be playing at their low-mid pace and probably doing solo or small group content. This setup would bring some imbalance to the archetype stats at release. But then, every new player who have chosen some archetype and doesn't have a friends group (of which there'll be a ton) can look for the server that has a fitting imbalance. And now this person can easily find a group to play with, because statistically his archetype would be needed there.

Obviously they'll have to put in work, because some parties might've gone for a quick alt switch to make their party optimal, but if you're leveling a main with the explicit desire to go deep into the game - I'd assume any party who's lacking a main of that archetype would be glad to get you. At least I know I would , if I was in that kind of situation.

We have not received permission from George_Black to share the quoted post.

With, at times, even being fucking OP as hell. I've died countless times to some SK with his god damn ToD or some Paladin and his flying fried chicken.

It's all about the design and the developer's goal for that design.