Lets have an actual, civil, class balance discussion.

[EbdanianAdmiral]

There is a ton of discussion on the forums about class system vs gear selection, custom servers, mechanics etc. What I hardly see any of is people talking about perks, gold, and general class balance. While everyone is free to have their own opinions about the class system, it is still in our greater interest to make it the absolute best that we can before custom servers are released. I kindly ask that discussion about the system itself is kept to the many other threads already discussing it, and we instead focus on giving constructive feedback regarding balance as it currently stands. I will start by highlighting what I believe the current balances issues are and how I would balance them within the confines of the weapons and mechanics available. This is all geared towards skirmish mode.

Heavy Calvary
Firstly, I very strongly believe that every Heavy Cav should join the Cataphract at 200 gold. The Heavy Cav are, admittedly by design, extremely OP. As balance currently stands they singlehandedly cause massive snowballing issues. When one faction is able to spawn as heavy cav twice and the other is not, the imbalance is extreme. Essentially whoever wins the first round is extremely likely to win the next 2. By setting them all to 200g you ensure that they are still a powerful force but not spammable within a 390 gold cap.

Sturgia Lacks Counterplay Options
Sturgia is a very "win more" faction. When you are better than the other team they are a blast. The Druziniik and Varyag give you a lot of firepower while looking awesome, and the archer and skirmisher units are serviceable without being amazing or garbage. The problems arise when the other team is able to use their factions strengths as an advantage. Sturgia currently lacks large shields to counter archers, maces on their mainline infantry to counter other heavily armored infantry, and large spears to counter cav. This leaves the faction very weak against the best units from other factions.

Battanian Fiann can footshot all of their inf while Battanian Oathsworn have armor that the Varyag cannot effectively deal with. Same applies to fighting Empire Legionaries and Palatine Guard.

Aserai, Khuzait, and Vlandia all have lances that are longer than any polearm Sturgian inf have access to. This means that a cav can just couch at a Sturgian inf and absolutely 0 potential counterplay exists. Combine this with the Druzinnik being the slowest heavy cav and Strugia has no answer to Heavy Cav. All other Heavy Cav can attack the infantry at will and just outrun the single answer Sturgia has.

Here is how you could fix these issues.

Give the Varyag the "Stronger Shield" by default. Replace the "Stronger Shield" perk with the Northern Mace. Now the class is no longer the most susceptible to having their shield shot around of all the heavy infantry, and they have a tool to deal with armor.

Every single "Shock Infantry" (Savage, Volgier, etc) has access to a polearm longer than 200 reach....except the beserker, who has no polearm option at all. Replace the "Long Sword" perk, which is completely unneeded on a twohanded specialist, with a Northern Pike or similar weapon. Now the beserker joins the other shock infantry as a major deterrent to cav and gives Sturgia possible counterplay.

Battania
Battania is in an awkward spot. They are not terrible, but I definitely believe they are the weakest faction. I think the strongest buff Battania could receive would be heavy cav moving up to 200 gold like I suggested earlier. At the moment, Battania does not have the same snowball and power play capabilities as the other factions purely because they have their best units as Inf and Archer rather than cav. Many people believe that Fiann are broken OP at the moment, but I strongly believe that the issue is infantry lacking counterplay options rather than anything the Fiann is doing. (Read: Infantry shields really need more coverage for MP) There are some other misc changes that I think could help Battania.

Replace the "Bastard Sword" perk with a mace of some kind. The Highland Longsword that the Oathsworn has access to is already quite good, and the Savage already does a very good job in the twohander niche. If the developers feel that the Oathsworn should still have a weapon with twohanded capabilities that is completely reasonable, just replace the currently useless "Ranged Javelins" perk.

The Throwing Spear perk that the Clan Warrior gets is a direct upgrade to the Spear perk. The Ash Throwing Spear is longer, faster, and hits harder than the Highland Spear. The extra 3 handling the Highland Spear has produces no noticeable difference in my testing.

Thank you for reading.

 

[The_Minotaur]

I think that Khuzait's spear infantry unit needs a rework. Their saving grave is the throwing spears perk, but you have to give up any hope of close-range combat to get it. Maybe give them a single throwable spear instead of their eastern spear as their default weapon, with the perk giving you a second shot if you decide to take it? They just feel really bad, unless the enemy team is VERY cav heavy.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

I think that Khuzait's spear infantry unit needs a rework. Their saving grave is the throwing spears perk, but you have to give up any hope of close-range combat to get it. Maybe give them a single throwable spear instead of their eastern spear as their default weapon, with the perk giving you a second shot if you decide to take it? They just feel really bad, unless the enemy team is VERY cav heavy.

The throwing spears should come with a melee weapon instead of a 3rd spear like in the beta.

 

[Flash118]

i do not understand your sturiga point. for exampel you said the oathsworn have armor the varyag can not handle but both have the same armor value and the varyag can take improved armor so he can get +9 armor more then the oathsworn. both classes do not have any maces they only can go for pierc weapons like spears or javelins.

another point i do not understand is your point with the polearms. i would not say they are rly strong they have the same problem like every other 2h unit. they get massiv countered by thorwing weapons and archers. maybe i miss understand you but polearms are 2h or not?

battania is a bit weird to play i agree with that but i think they are not as weak as we think. they play very differently from most other factions. in fact every infantry unit have javelins but no improved armor without the clan warrior. fun fact with improved armor the clan warrior have a higher armor value then the wildling. i think at the moment the biggest weakness of battania is that the game is very new and skirmish is a bit chaotic. its difficult to organize the team.

against heavy cav spam, spear units and archers have to play together and kill them when they are charging. just stack them up and then let the arrows fly. in my opinion at the moment you can not rly say wich faction/unit classes are massiv overpowered the most time you play against beginners or something like that.

to the khuzait spearman. i like this unit very much its just a better wildling but i guess you can optimiz this unit a bit. i do not understand why you should take the thorwing spear perk. you do not have a weapon for the close combat if you choose this perk. and if there is cav in the enemy team i prefer the longer spear.

 

[helari]

Heavy cavalry is not particularly OP. They are situational in captain mode, often less dangerous than normal infantry or archers in skirmish, and almost any spear and throwing weapon is a hard counter to cav. You might say the horse is not instantly killed by spears but the game has overall moved away from most 1 hit kills. A hit on the horse that makes it rear is an unblockable second hit on the rider.

Cav relies on surprise or excellent timing (and bad timing from the other party) against spear users and has to avoid direct fire from enemy ranged troops. TDM and siege are just a chaos of clueless players so cavalry can rack up kills simply charging situationally unaware enemies from behind but they can't win the match in siege.

I disagree on all points regarding Sturgia. The shield hitboxes are larger than the shields actually appear, so varyags are protected from head to toe if you hold block to the downward direction. You can not shoot a varyag in the foot from the front if you block in the down direction (and not in the face either, because the invisible hitbox protects the head also).

Varyags don't have access to maces but their default weapon is an axe. The axe doesn't have as much armor penetration as maces, but they are a middle ground between swords and maces against armor with the added ability of breaking shields. They have high enough base damage to deal good damage against armored enemies. I don't remember their damage type but it could be that they do have more armor penetration than swords. Varyags don't really suffer from the lack of maces because of this. They also have the option to take the heavy armor perk as their default because their default weapon is very good so they can be the tankiest infantry if other heavy inf pick maces over heavy armor.

The varyag's spear is also perfectly fine for taking down cavalry. The point about lances being longer than spears is incorrect, because the spearman is aiming for the horse which gives them another extra meter or so of advantage. Couched lances have a shorter reach than manual stabs and are easy to avoid, so manual stabs are the primary attack of cavalry.

All shock infantry doesn't require cavalry counters. Berserkers are very good shock infantry, so they don't need the mixed role of being able to effectively counter cavalry. Cavalry units stuck near a berserker or in a formation in captain will die anyways to just the axes.

I agree battania is definitely the weakest faction in captain but very serviceable in skirmish and siege, but I do believe oathsworn is middling at best and not a particularly good unit, similar to khuzait spear infantry.

Having played in the beta there's some wild claims about faction and class balance now that people are kind of figuring the game out for the first time.

 

[Tork789]

There is a ton of discussion on the forums about class system vs gear selection, custom servers, mechanics etc. What I hardly see any of is people talking about perks, gold, and general class balance.

I always ask the same question to everyone who tries to pass judgement on the current "balance": what is your judgement based on? The matchmaker puts you against random teams, one round you're against a stack of nolifers and the other you're put against people who literally just bought the game. How do you judge balance in that situation?

Like I always say: until we get tournaments and ranked going there's no objective data to judge the state of balance. It's all gonna be just speculation. Instead of trying to balance the game having a bunch of opinions, we better ask for tournaments and ranked so we could oberve what classes overperform or underperform.

 

[flavberg]

I feel that most of your points are flawed and lacking objectivity.

I cannot find how berserkers should have pikes (although I agree about the swords and I've yelled about them since the beta) when the Varyags are troops that already have decent spears. Playing berserker is not really viable in a decent match-up anyway, and there's other issues for that.

Heavy cavalry is not overpowered, get a spear. Battania, while not having cavalry, has extremely good archers and their infantry has spears, they can counter. It's not hard to abuse the Fiann's powerful bow once you get a hang of the game.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

i do not understand your sturiga point. for exampel you said the oathsworn have armor the varyag can not handle but both have the same armor value and the varyag can take improved armor so he can get +9 armor more then the oathsworn. both classes do not have any maces they only can go for pierc weapons like spears or javelins.

I also suggested that the Battanian inf get a Mace.

Spears are not reliable as AP in 1v1 fights.

another point i do not understand is your point with the polearms. i would not say they are rly strong they have the same problem like every other 2h unit. they get massiv countered by thorwing weapons and archers. maybe i miss understand you but polearms are 2h or not?

Spears counter cav and likewise ranged counters spears. This is basic medieval game balancing that is present literally everywhere

Heavy cavalry is not particularly OP.

I question how you came to this conclusion. You are entitled to your opinion but I am curios about what has transpired as youve played that led to this line of thinking.

The shield hitboxes are larger than the shields actually appear, so varyags are protected from head to toe if you hold block to the downward direction. You can not shoot a varyag in the foot from the front if you block in the down direction (and not in the face either, because the invisible hitbox protects the head also).

This is 100% false and fairly easy to prove.

I don't remember their damage type but it could be that they do have more armor penetration than swords.

They have the same percentage as a sword, which is a very low amount. Axes bounce off armor very frequently.

The varyag's spear is also perfectly fine for taking down cavalry. The point about lances being longer than spears is incorrect, because the spearman is aiming for the horse which gives them another extra meter or so of advantage. Couched lances have a shorter reach than manual stabs and are easy to avoid, so manual stabs are the primary attack of cavalry.

This is also fairly easy to prove false. The spearman has m a y be a 20 frame window where he can stop the horse, assuming that he is in the exact right position. Combined with spear hits from diagonally side no longer consistently stopping cav, slower direction changes for infantry, and an attack delay, your point loses a lot of merit.

Having played in the beta there's some wild claims about faction and class balance now that people are kind of figuring the game out for the first time.

I have been playing since the first North American players were invited to the Alpha

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

I feel that most of your points are flawed and lacking objectivity.

I cannot find how berserkers should have pikes (although I agree about the swords and I've yelled about them since the beta) when the Varyags are troops that already have decent spears. Playing berserker is not really viable in a decent match-up anyway, and there's other issues for that.

Heavy cavalry is not overpowered, get a spear. Battania, while not having cavalry, has extremely good archers and their infantry has spears, they can counter. It's not hard to abuse the Fiann's powerful bow once you get a hang of the game.

I would appreciate it if you could explain how I lack objectivity. The only reason I think beserkers should have a polearm is because every other troop of their class has a polearm equivalent. It is not ideal but I feel that the 1 handed spears do a terrible job right now.

If you feel that spears are fine I would love to face you as a Cav with a lance while you're holding one.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

I always ask the same question to everyone who tries to pass judgement on the current "balance": what is your judgement based on? The matchmaker puts you against random teams, one round you're against a stack of nolifers and the other you're put against people who literally just bought the game. How do you judge balance in that situation?

My judgement comes from playing with my clan against other clans who are also queuing together and playing serious competitive matches. I also have over 5000 hours in Competitive warband and I was selected as one of the better archers all time in NA. While warband balance has little to do with skirmish mode I believe that it at least gives me a baseline of the core mechanics and what to expect out of certain gameplay elements.

 

[G-sus]

I think that Khuzait's spear infantry unit needs a rework. Their saving grave is the throwing spears perk, but you have to give up any hope of close-range combat to get it. Maybe give them a single throwable spear instead of their eastern spear as their default weapon, with the perk giving you a second shot if you decide to take it? They just feel really bad, unless the enemy team is VERY cav heavy.

I agree with this, of all the factionss the Khuzait is the only faction I really don't enjoy playing as in MP.
I also think that the Vlandian sharpshooters need a little rework,Their crossbows is onehitting everything they set their eye upon,doesn't matter if you have improved armor or not. And it has become a bit of a meta foreveryone on skirmish to go full sharpshooter teamsince they are quite good in melee as well, feel like the other classes doesn't really get represented in a fair sense there.

 

[Tork789]

My judgement comes from playing with my clan against other clans who are also queuing together and playing serious competitive matches

That's something, I'll give you that. However, that's still anecdotal evidence, ideally we'd need the data from those matches and many others with various players involved, not just a few clans.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

That's something, I'll give you that. However, that's still anecdotal evidence, ideally we'd need the data from those matches and many others with various players involved, not just a few clans.

I agree. unfortunately without custom servers running practical tests is very hard. I am also very excited about the replay system. All I can provide is experience. I know what should happen based on my experience in competitive Mount&Blade and a baseline expectation for class and weapons counters. Im just bringing attention to where those counters are either skewed or lacking.

 

[Caps]

theres no point giveing all the nation maces, it just reduces variety. Once shields are nerfed by around 10-40%, axes will become more viable. And if they reduce weapon pokes.

Theres no point buffing the nations at all if they actually fix their combat. The longer they drag this out, the more work they will have later with all the rebalance. In Singleplayer aswell, beta means that the core gameplay is working, which is not the case.

The problem that everyone spams archer and cav is partly because infantry is ****. They cant make kills. Have close to 0 impact on the game.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

theres no point giveing all the nation maces, it just reduces variety. Once shields are nerfed by around 10-40%, axes will become more viable. And if they reduce weapon pokes.

I completely agree regarding the tankiness of shields. At the moment they allow a very turtle oriented playstyle and it seems that axes have almost no bonus damage. Ive heard a lot of players say they cant be aggressive and "punish" players enough and forcing people to actually melee block would be a step in the right direction.

Im a little confused about your mace point though. Every faction has multiple unique blunt weapons already in the game. Its not like they would all have the same model or style. Should we remove spears from some factions to add variety? Both are just tools to accomplish a certain niche task.

 

[helari]

I also suggested that the Battanian inf get a Mace.

Spears are not reliable as AP in 1v1 fights.



Spears counter cav and likewise ranged counters spears. This is basic medieval game balancing that is present literally everywhere



I question how you came to this conclusion. You are entitled to your opinion but I am curios about what has transpired as youve played that led to this line of thinking.



This is 100% false and fairly easy to prove.



They have the same percentage as a sword, which is a very low amount. Axes bounce off armor very frequently.



This is also fairly easy to prove false. The spearman has m a y be a 20 frame window where he can stop the horse, assuming that he is in the exact right position. Combined with spear hits from diagonally side no longer consistently stopping cav, slower direction changes for infantry, and an attack delay, your point loses a lot of merit.


I have been playing since the first North American players were invited to the Alpha

<snip>

edit. you're definitely wrong about the shield hit boxes and spears vs cavalry.

 

[Caps]

I completely agree regarding the tankiness of shields. At the moment they allow a very turtle oriented playstyle and it seems that axes have almost no bonus damage. Ive heard a lot of players say they cant be aggressive and "punish" players enough and forcing people to actually melee block would be a step in the right direction.

Im a little confused about your mace point though. Every faction has multiple unique blunt weapons already in the game. Its not like they would all have the same model or style. Should we remove spears from some factions to add variety? Both are just tools to accomplish a certain niche task.

it prevents from playin the same weapon over and over. Without spears infantry will be just cav fodder.

You could say you can tackle the task from 2 different ways.
You need to fix the root of the problem aswell. You want them to have maces because every attack from a sword or axe does 5 dmg and pokes. Its just frustrating to get hit because of fkin rng. Its hard that TW doesnt fixes this. Its more broken than all the SP issues.

 

[bess]

After over 100 games in skirmish, cav is by far the class that needs looking at first imo. Firstly I believe that the horses are way to tanky unless you get a clean hit on the rider as they are running at you, which is too much of a risk to open yourself up like that as most times you will loose the trade. I think they should just limit cav to 2 players in skirmish, too many games with 6 cav players in pubs. Also maybe look at making spears more effective against them I feel that if you have archers just let them kill the horses so you can finish them off when they fall of their horse.

TLDR: Horse too tank, spear too weak

 

[Caps]

After over 100 games in skirmish, cav is by far the class that needs looking at first imo. Firstly I believe that the horses are way to tanky unless you get a clean hit on the rider as they are running at you, which is too much of a risk to open yourself up like that as most times you will loose the trade. I think they should just limit cav to 2 players in skirmish, too many games with 6 cav players in pubs. Also maybe look at making spears more effective against them I feel that if you have archers just let them kill the horses so you can finish them off when they fall of their horse.

TLDR: Horse too tank, spear too weak

I would limit heavy cav by just making them more expensive. If they are it adds more choices. Either 3 light cav spawns or 1 heavy +1 light.

 

[EbdanianAdmiral]

it prevents from playin the same weapon over and over. Without spears infantry will be just cav fodder.

You could say you can tackle the task from 2 different ways.

Oh ok I see what you are saying now. I do not think maces will be meta or anything though. Adding Maces just gives them another niche tool against certain loadouts. In many situations taking the axe or sword perk will still be better. I also fail to see how adding another weapon to a class would take away variety? by replacing a +stat -stat shield that looks identical to the normal shield, you are actually introducing more weapon variety to a faction lol