Adam 'Gersh' Gershowitz shares the secrets of Souls in a roundtable discussion with Rift community members. Plus join in our Storm Legion Beta Giveaway!

Currently, you start out at 300 to 400 DPS when you hit level 50. Pre-expansion, you can reach 6000 DPS, but your hit points only increase slightly. Will this be similar in Storm Legion, or will the gap be smaller?

Gersh: I think what you’re going to find is, things are going to scale a little bit better in Storm Legion. You’re still going to hit the end of the game and you’re still going to keep going, because the tricky thing about that is there’s a certain level of power and perception that we try to make sure feels good. When you get a new sword, we want to make sure that it’s enough of an upgrade that you don’t want to use the previous one.

There are lots of ways of doing that, we can say ‘Hey, one point of strength equals a thousand DPS, or a hundred points of strength equals a thousand DPS.’ Ultimately, people feel better when numbers get bigger. It’s one of those ways that says ‘I’m progressing’. Numbers getting bigger is fun; hitting things in the face for a bazillion damage is fun. When you are 60 that really hard monster that you had a hard time with, and coming back after you’ve done everything and just smashing him in the face is fun.

But when it comes down to balance, we are doing a number of things in PvP, we are doing a number of things with hit points, to make sure player hit points scale a little bit better with regard to player DPS. Then we make up the differences as best we can with PvP and Valor and stuff like that, to make sure that what we’re increasing PvE wise to make the damage fun and exciting, and doesn’t detract as much as it has in the past from PvP.

The new abilities are high in the soul trees. Is it easier to balance a 61-point spec than a mixed spec?

Gersh: It’s not easier to balance a 61-point spec versus a hybrid.  Obviously hybrids are a little more complex to balance because there are more of them, but some of that also comes back to making sure people were interested and excited about getting Storm Legion. Yes, we could make the 50+ abilities not as powerful or interesting, but then people would come into the expansion and be like ‘I’m going to spend my ten points on a third soul, and not really experience any of the new abilities.’

It’s that fine line which we continue to walk since we launched the game, and even through Storm Legion, that as a player gets more powerful, we want things up there in the top of the tree that are attractive goals to look forward to. For players that aren’t expert players, those are the easiest goals to reach. It’s very obvious to look at the top of the tree and go ‘I have an awesome ability there.’ It’s a lot harder to go through eight soul trees and go ‘If I go across, up and over, because the way the math works out, I’m actually going to be better going that way.’

When you look at the 61 point trees, those are a little bit simpler and more straightforward, and a little bit more powerful in discrete abilities. When you look at hybrids, it’s built to be a little bit more expert. We still want to have single point souls feel good and play good, especially for players that aren’t interested in getting into hybridization but, at the same time, we still want hybrids to be viable. So we’re going to constantly go back and forth between ‘well, at this point in time the high end soul is going to be better, this point in time the hybrid’s going to be better’, and that’s going to continue to bounce back and forth a little bit as we continue to tune.

It looks like melee does more damage than ranged, and now all classes can go into melee. You also said in a live stream that bosses are going to be more melee friendly. Is everyone expected to go into melee now?

Gersh: No. What’s important to take from that is, when we say we’re trying to balance performance of classes across the board, you have to realize there are certain circumstances where classes are optimal. Obviously, a melee class is optimal when he can just stand there and hit a monster, and never have to move. A ranged class is optimal when you can’t stand close to the monster, and have to stand at range, and just haul away on him.

When we talk about overall balance, there is some assumption that the majority of things in our game aren’t going to be completely melee friendly or completely range friendly - it’s going to be some average between them. There are going to be things that say ‘Hey, I probably don’t want to hit this guy in the face’ or ‘Hey, it’s detrimental for me to stay further away’. What we’re really trying to do with our encounters, with our game balance overall, is to make sure there are some encounters that swing toward melee, there are some encounters that swing toward ranged, there are times when both ranged and melee are good in the same encounter.

It’s a really tough thing to do, because in any situation, especially when you talk about a hardcore raiding guild, they’re going to optimize, they’re going to look at it and go ‘Hey, melee is OK here, it’s a little bit harder to play, but because this encounter is a little bit more favorable to ranged classes, screw it we’re taking all ranged classes.’ So, once again, when you talk about game balance, it’s what’s fun, what’s interesting. Precision number balance isn’t very important, but at the same time we have to make sure any melee or ranged player can come up and have a good time, so we’re really targeting that middle.

There will be encounters that favor melee, there will be encounters that favor ranged, hopefully there are more encounters that are evenly split between the two, or trending to being slightly nicer to our melee guys. I know that’s been very important to our encounter designers, it’s been very important to our class designers, and it’s also one of the reasons why we made sure the Warriors had a ranged soul and the Mages had a melee soul. So in a particular situation, if you’re out there playing the game, you’re not like ‘you’re not bringing in any Mages at all, because they have no way of getting into melee encounters, and encounter number two is super melee friendly.

We want to make sure the players have the flexibility to choose to play what they want to play, the encounters cater to both, and that, in the average, everybody comes out the same.

How long will it take to gear up for the new raids after hitting 60?

Gersh: No matter what we do, the best players in the game will be better than our expectations. We’re hoping that Storm Legion is going to give a lot of players weeks to months of gameplay time. The fastest players are always going to blow through it a lot faster than we expect, but overall, it’s going to be similar to what you saw in live at launch. I wouldn’t be surprised if raiders are hitting raids in the first week or two, and possibly getting world firsts within the first month.

We’re going to do what we can to make sure that there’s a good solid course of progression there. We don’t want to hit people in the face with giant roadblocks, for two reasons. One, it’s not fun. Two, if we put a roadblock up for the really fast players, it makes the game for the average player a lot less enjoyable. I would basically say, if you’re going to play non-stop 24/7, you’ve still got a good couple of weeks’ worth of content, even if you’re just racing for the end.

But at the same time, you’re missing out on a lot of other things by focusing that way. So even if you get to the end and you’re like ‘Great, we’ve killed so-and-so, the last boss in the game’, there’s still going to be a ton of stuff to go back and do afterwards. We’re talking hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Mages can pick up skills to reduce the global cooldown. Are there any plans to give that to other classes?

Gersh: This comes back to that mobility question from earlier. I want to say that there are some other soul tree bonuses out there that will do similar things, but it is on a soul-by-soul basis, in terms of ‘Hey how can we make this class fun, how can we add a little mobility and speed, does it make sense?’ So, in the particular Mage builds where that occurs, that was specifically done because we said we can reduce the global cooldown a little bit, or we can give them +20% damage to the following abilities. And we said ‘Hey, reducing the global cooldown is different and fun.’

I want to say there’s something in the warrior tree that makes them go down, I’m not 100% sure, we have changed so many things, we’ve iterated on so many different concepts that may have been there four weeks ago, that may not be now, but it’s one of those things that we continue to tweak and play with.  

We’d like to thank Gersh for standing strong under a sustained onslaught of community questions. Patch 1.11 is on live servers now, while Storm Legion is due to launch on November 13th. 

Gareth "Gazimoff" Harmer, Staff Writer