Devblog: Class Balancing 28/11/2022 - 16:00

Osamodas

Osamodas' summons have always been their greatest assets and have always contributed to the class's unique gameplay. This was a complex revamp for us because we wanted to keep the summons capture system that makes Osamodas so special.

We have made minor changes to summons' rules – from now on, captured creatures evolve based on the summoner's level and characteristics. The summoner can take advantage of the variety of the summons they have captured through more dynamic summoning and unsummoning mechanics. Captured creatures also have an archetype that boosts their impact based on their role. We are really pleased we could bring this project to fruition, which has been well received by the community.

Eventually, once other priorities have been dealt with, we would like to expand the number of summons that can be captured per bracket, again with the goal of adding more gameplay possibilities and customization.
 

Ouginak

A community survey conducted in 2021 highlighted the Ouginak class as one of the least satisfactory ones.

So, we've made changes to the Ouginak class with two main focuses:

• make it more effective and decisive;
• and give it unique roles and specific features.

On this last point, we found that Ouginak was seen as a class that was in direct competition with the Iop and Sram classes. So, we've expanded its offtank aspect, MP reduction, and Armor generation to make it representative of a specific game idea. We're fully satisfied with this revamp, which has been really well received.
 

Foggernaut

Also in the same survey, we found that Foggernaut was among the classes with the lowest satisfaction rate. We completely revamped the class in 2020. It was the first class based on the "new model". We learned valuable lessons and decided to rework it to make it a more enjoyable and more effective class with greater depth and richer macro-mechanics.

We decided to put the turret back at the heart of Foggernaut gameplay and to add Stasis Points, which control the class's attack strength.

The Foggernaut class was a difficult class to rework because it has many gadgets and many possible focuses. Melee, distance, single target, area, tank, support, DPT, and others. There are enough strong and original concepts in this class to form two separate classes. That's why the distinction between WP and SP was so crucial during development for the last revamp.

To date, the revamp is getting a positive response in the Beta phase. We plan on rolling out the revamp in Patch 1.78 and monitoring both the response and how players use it.
 

Passives

For a few years now, we've felt it's really important to improve all classes' passives so that they'll offer signification variation in mechanics and gameplay. Therefore, we usually include constraints on the bonuses given by passives. These are essential in ensuring that the choice of passive is well thought out and causes a real change in the way the character is played. Also, we are increasing the number of passives available to each class, up from eight or ten to almost twenty per class.

Now that the new passive model has been applied to nine out of the eighteen classes, we've been analyzing player data, and it turns out that while some classes use a much wider variety of spells and passives than they did before balancing, others seem to overwhelmingly play specific combinations.

This is especially noticeable with classes whose purpose is to inflict damage.

We've opted to make very few passives that increase damage inflicted for the Osamodas, Ouginak, and Foggernaut classes. These are too often considered necessary to get the most out of a class, to the detriment of other ways of playing, which become unappealing. With Osamodas and Ouginak, we found that players tended to play different roles because they have a common damage inflicted percentage base.

Players' ability to customize and express themselves is the most important thing to us. Our main aim is to move toward a model where all players can play a class in as many ways as possible without experiencing a severe lack of competitiveness. WAKFU is a game with a significant RPG component and no major random element in the game mechanics. It is natural for some compositions or gameplay styles to be stronger than others, and we'll never be able to correct this aspect of the game entirely. Still, we want to strive for more balance and variation in ways of playing.

We think we've greatly improved this aspect over the last few years – for example, it was unthinkable to play without a Feca on the team until three years ago. Our work continues nonetheless.

To this end, we've developed more tools to better monitor and record your gaming habits, with usage data (spells and passives) on the one hand, and surveys on the other. This blended data tells us players' main preferences.
 

Control

Although this isn't a topic related to class balancing as such, there are several features we would like to discuss.

To date, we haven't decided on any changes to control, even though it is gradually becoming less and less useful. We hope we'll be able to make this an interesting mechanic in the future, but this feature may also eventually disappear entirely. Either way, control will no longer be used to increase the number of summons or mechanisms available to the player, as is now the case.
 

Area and Single-Target Masteries

This is a complex topic to broach with the community because we understand that many players use both these features. Changing them would make many current builds obsolete. However, as a team, we regularly debate both these characteristics' relevance. In our view, they force players to choose different spells and overspecialize. Specializing is not a bad thing, but whereas melee, distance, or rear masteries involve profound changes to gameplay, area and single-target masteries only restrict players' choices and make them build inflexible decks.

We're considering multiple options to address this issue, but we aren't yet convinced by where we are on the topic right now.

They could be replaced with alternative masteries:

• front or side mastery;
• mastery that requires you to have more than 90% HP;
• indirect mastery;
• non-critical mastery;
• adjacent mastery;
• long-distance mastery;
• etc.

We will check how these developments are being received in a survey at a later date.
 

Future

We have focused our efforts on extensive, meticulous changes to three classes so that they would regain a solid base that could be easily iterated upon. The issues are completely different for many of the other classes, which means they must be approached and developed differently. We don't really know whether we'll change the Iop or Cra classes as much as we changed Osamodas, for example…

As announced in the KrosmoNote, 2023 should see more class balancing than in previous years.

The two rounds of balancing we are planning for the first part of the year are Huppermage and Cra. Minor changes to others classes may be made at that time – if we're being honest, these would be Xelor and Eliotrope so that we'll have great consistency across the "ranged" classes.

We hope we'll make each class more satisfying to play while maintaining their identity and the reasons why the classes were played.