I just thought I would start a thread for people to comment on what they think balancing should be.

I hate the trend for people to compare two races or two guilds and try to find mirror opposites or identical-ish skills so they can say X = Y. It's boring. I don't want our guilds to be the same thing with different coats of paint. We should all have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, in my opinion, and I hope all balancing is done keeping this in mind.

Thoughts? Flames? Cookies?

Soll.

I was waiting for that...I love that sign.

I think everyone agrees we need to be different but equal, but it's easy to forget that when we're mired in the details. I think there's three things in particular people should remember, but don't:

1. Some skills can't easily be compared with other skills because they're useful in different situations. A lot of people will talk about how skill X is "useless" because they can't use it in some situation or other, when it's quite useful in another situation entirely.

2. Skills aren't only useful because you can "pull them off" or because they hurt the foe. A lot of skills are useful in more subtle ways. A skill that gives an easily-cured affliction is still useful if it consumes the foe's healing balances and you can time it so that prevents them from curing something else readily. A skill that you can never get the setup for is still useful if your foe has to waste curing resources preventing it and thus make themselves more vulnerable to something else you are going to do.

3. A lot of skills have to be ineffectual during one-on-one combat. For instance, there aren't many hindering skills (like web, aeon, stun) whose effect is longer than the time it takes for the attacker to recover balance, because if there were, you could easily create things like stun locks. But in a team those things can become useful when used in combination. Don't complain that "he recovers two seconds before I regain balance!" because they're all like that, intentionally and for a good reason.

That wins my award for the best post on the forums so far.

I personally would rather have entirely different skills, and have it be unbalanced, then everyone having the same balanced skills. It makes the game more fun.

Credit is due to the gods for giving people different skills, but still making it balanced overall .

Gwylifar pretty much hit it right on the mark in my mind.

Agreed.