With the release of Tyranny of Dragons we made some pretty big class balancing changes across several of the classes in Neverwinter. Since launch we’ve been gathering feedback and we made the promise of continuing to work on class balancing. When Rise of Tiamat launches, players can expect to see another big class balancing change, but you can check it out now on the Neverwinter Preview server.

The preview server has been recently updated to include the Class Balancing changes players can expect to see when Rise of Tiamat launches. However, this is still a work and progress and we need help from to the community to fine tune all of these changes.

Log into the Neverwinter Preview shard today to check out all the change, and then make sure to head to our forums and provide feedback directly to our devs. We have set up official feedback threads for the Trickster Rogue Changes, Devoted Cleric Changes and a separate thread for the other classes. As always we appreciate all the feedback we can get prior to the release of any class balancing changes and we can’t wait for everyone to check it out.

Click here to learn how to get access to the preview shard.

We also had an entire Neverwinter livestream devoted to class balancing changes. Community Manager Akromatik sat down with Systems Designer Chris "GentlemanCrush" Meyer to discuss the exciting class balancing changes coming to Neverwinter. Watch it below or head here to watch it on our Twitch Channel.

Watch live video from PerfectWorld_Community on Twitch

We also have a transcript of the dev Q&A here:

What can we expect to see with the clerics in terms of class balancing?

We reworked a large part of how Divine Mode works for clerics. We looked a lot at how clerics were being played in Neverwinter and discovered that, in a lot of cases, that gameplay for clerics could be somewhat passive or that you were really tied to a few certain powers like Astral Shield. We wanted to tweak this to give clerics more moment-to-moment gameplay options, which lead to the process of us wanting to make Divine Mode a little more active. We also wanted to create more interplay with the existing non-divine mode powers. To facilitate this, we looked at what Divine Mode really entails and what that means for players wanting to use that. We decided that being able to use more abilities would give players more moment-to-moment opportunities to choose how they keep their party healed or deal damage to foes.

To facilitate this, we changed how Divine Mode interacts with regular mode by adding 2 new mechanics. The first is that Divine Power accumulates much faster and the powers have no cooldown, allowing players to activate these powers back-to-back. The second is the “Empowered” feature. Casting a spell in Divine Mode give you one stack of Empowered, with each stack of Empowered, you’re non-Divine Mode powers get stronger. Each power has a unique interaction with this affect and the stacks of Empowered can be consumed by any non-Divine Mode power. Our reasoning behind this was to enable players to adapt more readily to a wider range of situations.

What was the divine intention behind the Empowered mechanic?

We wanted to remove the “binary” feel of Divine Mode versus non-Divine Mode. We felt that quite often, there were powers that it made sense to only cast them in Divine Mode and the only reason you would cast them in Normal Mode would be to accumulate Divine Power. We wanted to allow greater flexibility and choice in terms of how players play their clerics.

What was the biggest hurdle in the Devoted Cleric’s rework and why was it so difficult?

Well, we looked at cleric gameplay and one thing we saw was that it was somewhat difficult for clerics to interact with other players and still feel like they were part of an active gameplay mechanic. What we felt it boiled down to is that it seems like clerics weren’t interacting with their keyboard as often as other classes outside of the occasional AoE or encounter power. You could say that the most challenging this was figuring out how to make that gameplay more active, but still be approachable to new and veteran players alike.

There was another big challenge with the cleric. At first we thought we were going to give them a flat rework of their feats – similar to how we reworked some of the other classes. However, we really wanted cleric to feel like they had options and see them all as viable builds, so we organized the three feat trees into the three goals a cleric could have: Buffing and damage mitigation, direct healing, and the damage tree. We really wanted to have the damage dealing build with the cleric feel satisfying, which actually proved to be trickier than we had originally thought.

Healing Word appears to be a line AoE. What was the intention behind the change to Healing Word?

Healing Word was always a cool spell. The ability to put a HoT spell on someone directly has always been really nice, but it was somewhat frustrating to target someone specific in a large battle. This is why we changed it to a line AoE. It also no longer extends the duration of the healing, it just stacks up, which makes it more potent as you accumulate more stacks.

Can you tell us a little more about the changes made to Astral Shield?

We saw that Astral Shield was granting a huge amount of player power and was a little overpowered in relationship to where we wanted to take the cleric. We found that it did a little bit of everything in addition to giving players a flat resistance to damage, so we made a couple big changes to it. First, it now looks at the damage resistance of the player who is standing it and makes them more effective based on the individual players stats. It still grants a boost to damage mitigation, but is no longer a static increase in damage. It also doesn’t heal any more—it grants temporary health, which is effectively a form of a shield.

What can we expect to see in terms of class balancing for Trickster Rogues? Are rogues going to get more AoE attacks or will their existing attacks, such as “Path of the Blade” or “Blitz” be changed to make them more apt for PvE contexts?

We’re making a couple major changes to give Rogues a little more AoE potency and move away from some of the more needlessly complicated gameplay that can come with using Path of the Blade. What  we’ve done is we’ve actually made Path of the Blade hit up to 3 targets instead of one at 1/3 of the normal damage, so when you’re hitting 3 targets, you’re damage output is still technically the same. Currently, Path of the Blade is largely used to deal some passive damage to a given foe and trade off some burst damage for some sustained damage. We wanted to make this power feel like a strong AoE option for rogues especially because it targets random foes. We’re hoping that with the changes we’ve made to Path of the Blade that we’ll be able characterize it more as a viable AoE power.

Other changes we’ve made are making Blitz have a higher target cap and do slightly more damage to give it a better “large target effect”. We’ve also made Dazing Strike behave fairly differently. The non-stealth version will activate as fast as the stealth version and when you use the stealth version, you will actually get a cone AoE. This affords rogues another AoE that they can apply towards foes and it’s a big AoE control that they can pair with Smoke Bomb to allow them to assist their allies more effectively. We’re hoping that these changes will allow rogues to feel more competitive in those AoE situations.

What was the biggest hurdle in the Trickster Rogue’s rework and why was it so difficult?

The biggest challenge with the rogue’s rework was figuring out 3 unique ways that they could approach combat without breaking it for everyone else. We like the idea of stealth, but it can be problematic in some instances, so we wanted to find a way to have a stealth system that feels satisfying, but doesn’t negatively impact the interaction with other players and critters in Neverwinter. We definitely wanted to make perma-stealth much more difficult to achieve and draining stealth while you’re attacking plays a big role in that. We realize that it can be pretty frustrating to fight against that with no real recourse, so we wanted make that something that was more difficult to achieve and decrease the damage output somewhat for rogues that choose that build.

We’ve talked a lot about the Devoted Cleric and Trickster Rogue, what can we expect to see for the other classes that got their big makeovers in previous modules?

We’ve already done the bulk of our balancing changes on many other classes. For example, the Guardian Fighter received changes to their mark and blocking abilities to make them more viable as tanks and Great Weapon Fighters received a small set of changes focusing on their Destroyer tree with some minor changes to the Sentinel tree to make them stand out against Destroyers. In module 5, we are making some changes to the Instigator tree so that it gives it the feel of being a tank/DPS hybrid.

For Control Wizards, we’re pretty happy where Oppressor and Thaumaturge are in a general sense right now and we’ve been looking closely at Renegade. In addition to some bug fixes, we wanted to make Renegade a little more powerful as a Jack of all trades critical and buff path that gives them a little more flexibility and options in terms of gameplay. It’s never really been viable before, especially with Thaumaturge being considered the “premier” direct-damage dealing version for wizards. With these changes coming in module 5, we’re hoping to distinguish the Renegade path and make it a viable gameplay option.

Hunters have had the majority of their changes in previous modules, but we still feel that the Trapper path could be performing better. We’ve made some big buffs to how trapper works in order to make them feel effective as a hybrid/controller. We’ve made a huge buff to their capstone feat by making it twice as effective, so we’re definitely excited to see how that turns out.

How do you go about making sure a class remains relevant in both PvE and PvP?

This presents a difficult set of challenges because the gameplay is very different between PvP and PvE. Certain powers may be very powerful in PvP, but not so much in PvE. An example of this is what we did with prones in Module 4. Against monsters, prones are not as useful, but against players it’s quite the opposite. This is why in some cases we will have powers function differently in PvE and PvP. One key part of being able to achieve this balancing is listening to feedback and examining the contexts in which certain features would be used and making changes to suit both PvP and PvE.

Many players have been suggesting making powers behave differently in PvE and PvP, so that one does not get in the way of the other, in terms of balancing. Lately, we've seen some changes that do take that into consideration (such as reducing cc duration or damage on actual players compared to AI).Is this something you plan to expand on to separate PvP and PvE balancing?

This is something that we do take into consideration. We want all of our powers to feel relevant in both PvP and PvE contexts. It’s not quite feasible to have 2 versions of every power, so we do have to be careful when we make changes like that because we want players to still feel like they know how to play their class when they are entering a different gameplay mode and we don’t want them to feel like they have to memorize small differences between the different classes and their powers that aren’t readily apparent. However, in some rare cases where the power needs to behave differently, we have made it so that it will have different effects in PvE and PvP. That being said, we don’t want to have all of our powers organized that way because it’s very difficult for most players to pick up quickly and difficult for us to maintain on a development level because it literally doubles the amount of powers we need to work on and consider in future class balancing.

What is the intended use of gear score? Is it calculated the same for each class?

 In general, we use gear score as a rough estimate of player power. It doesn’t account for everything because not all feats can add to it reasonably and there are many factors that play into a given character’s overall effectiveness and many of those are very difficult to calculate in real time. It is, however, a quick baseline understanding of how powerful a given character is. A character with 12,000 gear score is obviously going to be stronger than a character that has 4,000 and there is a general formula that calculates this, basically it’s the sum of your Attack/Healing value and your Protection value, both of which are ways that we add up a character’s stats. The different types of weapons and armors (such as plate armor versus leather armor) can create some minute differences in gear score, but we also have ways of normalizing these figures so that gear score remains consistent across classes.

Since Module 3, almost all changes have been to make each class more powerful compared to the release version of Neverwinter. Are you planning any adjustments to current PvE content (dungeons/skirmishes) in order to keep them challenging?

We’ve mostly been concerned with building new content for the future and we’re always looking for ways to make things more challenging. We’ve been working on some long-term plans aimed at allowing for a bigger gradient of content to exist in terms of difficulty. We’re testing some things out internally, but we aren’t changing any of the PvE existing content at this time.

Are there any upcoming updates to PvP combat such as new maps, game modes, or a dueling system on the horizon?

As far we know, we don’t have a whole lot planned for the short-term, but we are looking into adding some PvP content a little father off in the future. Unfortunately, we cannot share more than that at this time.

What can we expect to see in terms of class balancing in the future?

We’ve pretty much gotten all the classes to where we want them more or less, but we’re always keeping an eye on how balancing interacts with new content. Hopefully we won’t have to make any drastic changes to any of the classes moving forward, but if we need to, we will. We can’t share a whole lot about it, but we’ve got some pretty great things on the horizon that we’re definitely very excited about.

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