Just an observation I've seen a bit. Okay, so maybe the classes are now balanced at the top level, I wouldn't know. However, one thing I've noticed is that when it comes to defending against each class, the reqs are quite a lot different. Against a guardian, tritrans and possibly focus mind, and a decent system can save you from their afflictions, and mages are similar. However, against warriors, you actually need to have trans resilience and combat to be able to withstand them, too. Now granted this won't bother a lot of people, but the sheer amount of credits you have to fuel into this makes the, well, bars of skill quite different. While it may be as easy for an omnitranscendant person to beat a guardian or a mage as a knight, it's not true for those without credits at all. Anyone else noticing this?

You do realize we have to learn knighthood to progressively better afflictions and have to spent countless hours forging or pay grossly high amount of gold for good weapons and armor. Saying that you have to get credits to beat a knight is the same as you have to get credits to get skills to fight. Not all classes were meant to be completely balanced or else that would make combat extremely boring.

When I was an Aquamancer, all I needed were my guild skills and up to shieldparry in combat to beat knights. The people that I were lucky enough to be beat weren't particularly great or knew much about rune curing at the time, but it can still be done. If nothing else, it made me more proud when I was able to beat a Knight that was doing overy 1000 damage to me every 2 swings out of 2500 health.

Uhhh. This part at least is BADLY mistaken. Variety, yes. Imbalance, NO.

You don't need trans resilience or trans combat to withstand a warrior...adept combat for parrying and inept resilience is good enough, little use of rebounding and shield, webbing or other kinds of entangling, afflictions, stances (who are highly effective even at adept combat)...etc, countless ways to halt a warrior's offense into null.

I keep hearing people on the boards saying that if people want to resist warrior damage, "get trans resilience and combat or you can't complain." And, well, it's just that in my experience people like Iasmos maul me way too hard (it was during testing) to be believed, so I assumed they were right.

I'll put it this way, if you have trans resilience, you don't need any skill to easily beat a warrior, if you don't have trans resilience, you need to use aformentioned methods to beat one.

With trans Resilience, even the weakest warriors do a good 1k+ to me while I'm fully deffed.

I'm finding defenses are just really odd right now - we need to get some full tests done (no regens, have someone hack you, heal, hack, heal, hack - at least 25 times with no defenses, 1 defense, armor, etc.).

I'm finding the only ways to kill a decent knight (not a great knight) are either to get them down before they hit you, or to be a knight.

Fact of the matter is, class 'balance' isn't only about combat. Even if it is true that they are superior in combat, they loose out on things that every other class gets. I can't get off plane without a) help or 2) walking to Glomdoring or Serenwilde. I don't have any way to fly or burrow and I need enchantments to waterwalk, waterbreathe, and locate (the lamest one). The only transit skills I have beyond via in rituals are those publically available through Planar. Also consider how high we have to be in Knighthood/specialization in order to do any afflictions or have a chance of hitting most of the time...compared to the very few lessons needed for, say, cosmicfire. I played my 8th level Celestian recently with cosmicfire and a decent int, and it was embarrassing how fast things in newton died.

The point is, there are a lot of things to consider when talking about balance, and it isn't all about combat. There are many other skills and utilities that also have to be built into the equation. As in other IRE games, for any class there are classes that are easier to fight and those that are harder.

And I have a feeling the people who said you NEED to trans resilience and combat weren't making very good use of their stances, parrying, rebounding, shielding, webbing, etc.