Lotro _needs_ a comprehensive bugfix and rebalance update

[siipperi]

When you look back through the history of the game, all the level caps actually achieved was smacking the reset button on player gearing, and forcing us to rebuild our LIs, without actually contributing much (if anything) to our functionality at level cap.

Yup MMOs in a nutshell.

[Beaniemooch]

Thank you for adressing this. I understand it's hard to balance between old content, upcoming content and balance it everything out. But often small fixes are the most important, fix few skills/traits have really big impact to make game great for everyone or ruin game totally for some players by making their classes too easy and one dimensional (guardians and minstrels). But please if you could expirement on bullroarer by nerffing bolstering our courage trait bonus down even 30-40% it could be a start for many minstrels to pick up their class again, yet not radical enough to make players quit it because lack of healing ability.

I've been a proponent of reducing the bolster our courage proc since it came out, but it has to be balanced with incoming damage in T2, other class healing abilities like RK hots, cappy healing, bubbles from both, LM heals, etc. There is no sense in nerfing the minstrel to make it less attractive. We've already had our in-combat rez removed from all but one traitline (blue), unlike cappy or RK (do not fall) which is available in all trait lines.

These were things, among others, that were brought up when trait trees came about but were totally ignored. The BC proc isn't the only thing wrong with the minstrel. The whole system needs an overhaul.

[bucko39]

At this point, LotRO needs a FFXIV ARR. Unforunately, the core of LotRO isn't strong enough to rebuild the MMO around...

This^^
For me, Vyvyanne's post said one thing: We are "sprinting" to get to Mordor, all other concerns are secondary. The only problem with that..."all other concerns" is a steaming pile of dung that is weighing the game down.
Personally, I would be fine if over the next four months the main focus was fixing everything that is wrong with this game--from the bottom up. Give us Minas Tirith next year.

[LagunaD2]

This^^
For me, Vyvyanne's post said one thing: We are "sprinting" to get to Mordor, all other concerns are secondary. The only problem with that..."all other concerns" is a steaming pile of dung that is weighing the game down.
Personally, I would be fine if over the next four months the main focus was fixing everything that is wrong with this game--from the bottom up. Give us Minas Tirith next year.

"Sprint" in this context is jargon connected to a particular software development model.

It doesn't mean "rushing" or "racing the clock", it means periodically, like every month, they get together in a meeting (sometimes called a "scrum") and decide on a set of work to finish by some (not too distant) date. The working period between these "goal-setting" interludes is called a "sprint".

The problem with postponing content is that it also postpones revenues. And it seems unlikely that they have the expertise to fix "everything that is wrong" even if they wanted to.

I'm afraid the best we can realistically hope for is that the "steaming pile" grows at a more modest rate.

[Almagnus1]

This^^
For me, Vyvyanne's post said one thing: We are "sprinting" to get to Mordor, all other concerns are secondary. The only problem with that..."all other concerns" is a steaming pile of dung that is weighing the game down.
Personally, I would be fine if over the next four months the main focus was fixing everything that is wrong with this game--from the bottom up. Give us Minas Tirith next year.

In the agile development model, you have a several two week "sprints" for each release (normally about four sprints to a release, so you have a release every two months).

It's a pretty common software development style, and one that actually allows the devs to be fairly reactionary, so it's actually a good sign that Turbine is taking this model, as it allows Turbine to better adapt to what happens in game, than what they were doing before hand. However, I suspect past EPs to have more ego than logic involved with their decisions, because the XP's feature generally overshadowed all else, which has been basically what's been going on since MoM. RoI was the only expansion after MoM where they got things mostly right (counting F2P as an expansion, that is). F2P would be there, but it got overshadowed by the idiocy that was the stat uncapping.

[bucko39]

"Sprint" in this context is jargon connected to a particular software development model.

It doesn't mean "rushing" or "racing the clock", it means periodically, like every month, they get together in a meeting (sometimes called a "scrum") and decide on a set of work to finish by some (not too distant) date. The working period between these "goal-setting" interludes is called a "sprint".

The problem with postponing content is that it also postpones revenues. And it seems unlikely that they have the expertise to fix "everything that is wrong" even if they wanted to.

I'm afraid the best we can realistically hope for is that the "steaming pile" grows at a more modest rate.

I'm aware of what sprint means in the context it was used, it was a play on words on my part

[Calta]

Balance, especially in a game like LOTRO that caters to a variety of play styles is a very subjective issue, but yes we are constantly looking into posts here, as well as our own game play experiences and the pure data that we collect from the game to see where there might be flaws and attempt to fix them. We will continue to do so as we go along as every change we make to the game can affect perceptions of balance whether it is systems related or not.

I can not list what priority these things sit in because as we are a Live product our priorities are based on what the current needs of the product are and can change every 2 weeks when we begin our next sprint. Plus priorities for the product itself are one thing vs priorities for the individual developers working on various areas of the game. We do have to continue developing new content and support that with systems work as well as continue to work at chipping away the bugs and balance issues. We tend to do this in quarterly cycles Content, bugs/ balance, Content, bugs/ balance, etc. Right now the team is focused on building the next big content push and all that goes with it in Minas Tirith. That is not to say some of the balance concerns will not get addressed in that update, just that they would be secondary.

In general though, do not expect to see one big sweeping pass across all game skills and abilities. Large passes like that in a game of this type can be extremely dangerous. We prefer to make smaller tweaks so that there is focus and time to asses feedback from the community on the changes. Sweeping broad strokes can completely change the way a character is played and upset more people than you help and have knockdown affects across the entire game space that were unintended.

Firstly, thank you for your active participation in this thread. The last sentence essentially sums up the reaction to the HD class redesign, especially from those of us whose classes were redesigned into a pale shadow of their former glory. While, (edit : future) huge passes across classes would be unwise, there are some major internal class issues that still have not been addressed and while tweaks have been made, there are NO class notes on many of them.

There are problems for which the consensus fix has been established by players for nearly two years. Take Minstrels as a case in point. Many of the bugs or problems have been tweaked-song of aid, CoS tail animation are 2 that come to mind, but players who moaned about these are unaware that they have been tweaked. There have been no patch notes-except about the PvP armour piercing cry fix. Meanwhile, fundamental issues, like no in combat rez in 2 of three lines and the bolster courage aoe proc that even minstrels said should be reduced are still there, and are still causing frustration. (So is the insignificant group bubble and too small raise the spirit single target heal-edit: which would need to be addressed if the BC aoe proc is removed entirely, like many PvPers want it to be.)

Therefore, I would love to see a review of feedback on each class and a 'class of the month' pass by developers on the core problems (champ animations, minstrel having no in combat rez in their support line, guards self healing, warden bleeds (edit: and gambits in BBs), etc) and for the devs to provide updated class notes at the same time.

Some issues have been fixed. Thank you team, for that. But if you read the class notes (and tooltips in some cases) you would never know. This causes poor perception of how much you guys have actually done, reinforces the 'they don't listen' stereotype and makes people who gave up after the great HD class change diaspora reluctant to try the game again.

But once again, I would like to say I see your participation in this thread as a sign that approach may change. Perhaps just start with updating the class notes for each class as they are working at present? The minstrel one is just plain wrong.

[UwS-Harledir]

Firstly, thank you for your active participation in this thread. The last sentence essentially sums up the reaction to the HD class redesign, especially from those of us whose classes were redesigned into a pale shadow of their former glory.

While, huge passes across classes would be unwise, there are some major internal class issues that still have not been addressed and while tweaks have been made, there are NO class notes on many of them. Take Minstrels as a case in point. Many of the bugs or problems have been tweaked-song of aid, CoS tail animation are 2 that come to mind, but players who moaned about these are unaware that they have been tweaked. There have been no patch notes-except about the PvP armour piercing cry fix. Meanwhile, fundamental issues, like no in combat rez in 2 of three lines and the bolster courage aoe proc that even minstrels said should be reduced are still there, but so is the insignificant group bubble and too small raise the spirit single target heal.

There are problems for which the consensus fix has been established by players for nearly two years. Therefore, I would love to see a review of feedback on each class and a 'class of the month' pass by developers on the core problems (champ animations, minstrel having no in combat rez in their support line, guards self healing, warden bleeds, etc) and for the devs to provide updated class notes at the same time.

Some issues have been fixed. Thank you team, for that. But if you read the class notes (and tooltips in some cases) you would never know. This causes poor perception of how much you guys have actually done, reinforces the 'they don't listen' stereotype and makes people who gave up after the great HD class change diaspora reluctant to try the game again.

+1 agree completely.

Unfortunately it seems Turbine does not have more than 2-4 devs working on lotro anymore these days and in every second sentence coming from any Turbine employee, all you here is "we are short on ressources", "we don´t have the ressources to do that" ...

[UwS-Harledir]

I can not list what priority these things sit in because as we are a Live product our priorities are based on what the current needs of the product are and can change every 2 weeks when we begin our next sprint. Plus priorities for the product itself are one thing vs priorities for the individual developers working on various areas of the game.

you are kidding with this statement? So basically you have just said that - we don´t care what players have been saying *all these years* and fix things as we like or care to do.

"chipping away" at bugs - now even you make it sound like there is only 1 (maybe not even that) dev working on bugs. Priorities need to be checked and re-checked on a daily basis - 101 project management.
1st Priority is (for any product) to keep the customers happy - seems this priority has been lost since at least HD. Your *paying* customers are asking time and time again (some things over years) to be fixed.
The only priority is to put in new bugged content and ignore customers (PC PvMP also showed this very clearly - how many severs are playing on the new PvP map these days??).

[Grimdi]

Personally, I would be fine if over the next four months the main focus was fixing everything that is wrong with this game--from the bottom up. Give us Minas Tirith next year.

I'll guarantee you that it would take much more than four months to really fix even just the fundamental issues (mostly scaling) as they'd likely have to take the game apart, replace several rotten spaghetti code subsystems and put it back together. And no way they have the resources to properly test the result.
This is the result of the past years where always only the next release was relevant for development.

And regarding HD: That clusterf*ck didn't just bring us trait trees but also a massive boost to stats (esp. vitality) from itemization, which later on resulted in various stat-nerfs screwing things up even more. Anyone with half a brain could see it coming during HD beta that the itemization would break the game balancing, likely forever.
Oh, and not forgetting the much announced but totally broken character upscaling feature and the Epic Battles role trees that had nothing to do with the normal character/class development. And that's just the issues introduced with HD.

[JeauxLOTR]

As for the Trait Trees, remove the 2-point penalty for picking skills outside the main Tree Line. This would allow people to pick up some of the skills they can’t have in the current system. This would seem to go a long way in making people more accepting of the Trait Trees, allow for actual diversity in builds and maybe even pull back players who left the game over the Trees.

[siipperi]

I've been a proponent of reducing the bolster our courage proc since it came out, but it has to be balanced with incoming damage in T2, other class healing abilities like RK hots, cappy healing, bubbles from both, LM heals, etc. There is no sense in nerfing the minstrel to make it less attractive. We've already had our in-combat rez removed from all but one traitline (blue), unlike cappy or RK (do not fall) which is available in all trait lines.

These were things, among others, that were brought up when trait trees came about but were totally ignored. The BC proc isn't the only thing wrong with the minstrel. The whole system needs an overhaul.

Agreed, they need to be careful how much they nerf, because easily after that RKs are top dogs, because after all their healing is insanely OP as well. However I think nerffing bolstering our courage to make group healing smaller than on inspiring fellows is right way towards more fun and more balanced healing on minstrel. However if they would entirely remove bolstering our courage minstrel would be totally fine in PvE instances, heck yellow is totally fine line to heal every instance in the game and even that feels easy.

What do you mean it's not only thing that is not wrong with the class? Do you mean spike damage - healing numbers game or how skills are useful in general?

[bucko39]

The problem with postponing content is that it also postpones revenues. And it seems unlikely that they have the expertise to fix "everything that is wrong" even if they wanted to.

On this particular bit...this is just my opinion, but...
If a lot of what is wrong with the game was fixed...let's just throw some things at the wall...1) top to bottom revamp of the loot system 2) ditto with the instance clusters (unbalanced and inconsistent) 3) good scrub of the classes and their skills (get rid of some useless skills or make them worthwhile--wind-lore, gust of wind, melody of battle to name a few), etc.

Honestly, if just those three things were "fixed", I would argue that Turbine would see revenue in the form of old players they chased away coming back to the fold.

[Gandie2]

Another difference is that for regular movement, the client decides, and only in a few cases the server overrides .

Great post - not going to quote the whole thing. Just the bit where I think you have it wrong. Our side of this relationship never gets to decide. Early on in on-line games things were designed to let the client run the world the player was in, and just 'update' the server with the players progress and location. This led to people cheating. Proggies where made that could 'lie' to the server and report pretty much anything the player wanted.

As a result on line games had no choice but to make all the action be simultaneously run on the server and client - which does result in the behavior you describe and pretty much exactly as you describe. Player is running across a field and on approaching a fence jumps the fence. On the players client he see's himself successfully jump the fence and keep running. The client says wait -- I didn't see you jump that fence - I saw you run into that fence. The client puts you back at the fence. This happens regardless of the mode of transportation. However as you pointed out the war steed speed makes it happen much more often. But when the server gets bogged down it can happened any place.

[Reximus]

What was incredibly unpopular was the extremely insular way in which they introduced the tree structure. "We don't really want your input even though we've asked for it kthnxbai". "Yeah we'll get to your suggestions when.... never, ok, never." "Didn't have time to make any changes since it was first introduced even though we've promised multiple times and it's going live tomorrow but we threw in some dps and hope that's enough to hold you til next time." "Sorry next time isn't coming." Oh wait, they never admitted that last part. It just became evident when minstrels were promised attention and adjustments and answers that were put off and put off and finally never happened. We got the memo.

I'd have actually listened to the players trying to add balance and making suggestions since they're the ones affected and who actually play the class enough to be familiar with it.

Captain's had a good run with feedback during that time, but things that couldn't be squeezed in got abandoned when our point of contact was laid off, so I'm not sure your experience is typical. Besides, every MMOs players say they devs don't listen to players, I tend to think "players" have an overinflated view of their ability to balance things out, and how much of the community they actually represent.

[hurant]

I have updated the #2 post with a very important thing I forgot to mention in the OP (buff/debuff refresh lag).

I would also like to thank many posters here for valuable comments on the points I raised and for other feedback.

Balance, especially in a game like LOTRO that caters to a variety of play styles is a very subjective issue, but yes we are constantly looking into posts here, as well as our own game play experiences and the pure data that we collect from the game to see where there might be flaws and attempt to fix them. We will continue to do so as we go along as every change we make to the game can affect perceptions of balance whether it is systems related or not.

I can not list what priority these things sit in because as we are a Live product our priorities are based on what the current needs of the product are and can change every 2 weeks when we begin our next sprint. Plus priorities for the product itself are one thing vs priorities for the individual developers working on various areas of the game. We do have to continue developing new content and support that with systems work as well as continue to work at chipping away the bugs and balance issues. We tend to do this in quarterly cycles Content, bugs/ balance, Content, bugs/ balance, etc. Right now the team is focused on building the next big content push and all that goes with it in Minas Tirith. That is not to say some of the balance concerns will not get addressed in that update, just that they would be secondary.

In general though, do not expect to see one big sweeping pass across all game skills and abilities. Large passes like that in a game of this type can be extremely dangerous. We prefer to make smaller tweaks so that there is focus and time to asses feedback from the community on the changes. Sweeping broad strokes can completely change the way a character is played and upset more people than you help and have knockdown affects across the entire game space that were unintended.

Thank you for such a detailed answer!
From what you say, I understand that what I suggested is not possible. I.e. bugfix and rebalance update, either a big update or a series of significant updates, is not possible.

I can assume nothing or very little is going to be changed with how healing and damage works, how trait trees work, etc.

I still strongly believe you should put way more focus on fixing obvious bugs (some examples in the original post).

"Balance" is a dangerous word. It implies I or some other forums posters are asking for very detailed changes. In my opinion a DPS class able to outheal 100% of damage of a single high-rank creep player or T2 3-man damage 100% of the time passively or with a <16s cooldown percentage heal is FAR, FAR beyond this word "balance". I am (and many others are) merely asking for some of the game mechanics not to be absurd.
At the same time, these kinds of changes are very easy to introduce. E.g. make self-motivation and hearten/composure cooldown +60s in non-heal trait lines, make Thrill of Danger not proc off DoTs.

Early on in on-line games things were designed to let the client run the world the player was in, and just 'update' the server with the players progress and location. This led to people cheating.
[...]However as you pointed out the war steed speed makes it happen much more often.

Off-topic1: Sadly, some games/MMOs still are designed this way, e.g. ArcheAge.
Off-topic2: War-steed is quite unique in this, it will keep rendering client position wrongly indefinitely when stuck. But yes, regular movement interestingly can also be misjudged by client, e.g. falling down animation, then back up the ledge.

you are kidding with this statement? So basically you have just said that - we don´t care what players have been saying *all these years* and fix things as we like or care to do.

"chipping away" at bugs - now even you make it sound like there is only 1 (maybe not even that) dev working on bugs. Priorities need to be checked and re-checked on a daily basis - 101 project management.
1st Priority is (for any product) to keep the customers happy - seems this priority has been lost since at least HD. Your *paying* customers are asking time and time again (some things over years) to be fixed.
The only priority is to put in new bugged content and ignore customers (PC PvMP also showed this very clearly - how many severs are playing on the new PvP map these days??).

I can only imagine Turbine regards most of the PvMP feedback as whining, and not justified concerns. I believe they have no tools or knowledge to differentiate which is which. (See: random post about BA vs LM fight and VT -50% heal debuff.)

I would really like for PvMP players of both factions send an uniform message to Turbine - "healing sustaining PvMP fights forever is a problem"!
Sadly, there is no such thing happening. I am trying for some time to do exactly that, but I get very little support on that, and actually quite many posters are opposed to solving that.

In my opinion it is both sad and funny how a simple change would solve so many PvMP problems (bringing back stackable incoming healing debuffs).

[Almagnus1]

Touching on FFXIV ARR, and how that reboot worked...

First and foremost you need a studio that's basically willing to redevelop an MMO, while also grandfathering in all the existing players exactly where they stand.

The second thing that's absolutely needed is solid class design, so that the before and after works well. That's something about FFXIV with the classes is that they didn't change significantly (if at all) from before and after ARR. That's where LotRO is going to have problems, as our class system is a complete and utter mess, that's (TBH) not worth saving.

The other component that allowed them to get away with such a drastic rework, and play it off as part of the game, was the event where they basically had Cthulhu (ok, Bahamut) locked in a moon, and the big bad had brought the moon down and started to release Bahamut, which basically laid waste to the landscape, giving it some of the unearthly crystal structures throughout the world. That allowed them to release a fairly small world (I would bet that LotRO's is bigger) and allow them to overhaul zones and re-release them once they have been fixed, but it also took advantage of the exceedingly good use of landscape that FFXIV has, not only with their (superior IMO) equivalent to the warband, but also with the way their repeatable quests work, and the incentives they have created in their class/job system for you to level other classes (as you need to level the primary to 30 and the secondary to 15 to unlock the advanced class, then there's cross class skills worth having, which is why an advanced class at 60 will often have a secondary at 34 and a tertiary at 26). There's a level in synergy between everything that makes FFXIV tick, and if any one of those systems weren't as good as they are, I doubt it would have succeeded as well as it did.

Captain's had a good run with feedback during that time, but things that couldn't be squeezed in got abandoned when our point of contact was laid off, so I'm not sure your experience is typical. Besides, every MMOs players say they devs don't listen to players, I tend to think "players" have an overinflated view of their ability to balance things out, and how much of the community they actually represent.

Or the devs think the players are suffering from forum induced groupthink, so their feedback isn't as good as the players think it is (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink).

[Jillymala]

HD was a class system revamp, tho, not a rebalance. They introduced a whole new tree structure system that they thought would be better for the game, and lets be honest, the vocal minority here in the forums, who hated it, does not represent them player-base in any capacity. I bet more people liked the new system better overall and Turbine would do it again.

Wonder why the place was a ghost town after HD then.. If players who didn't especially like the destruction of the classes weren't a representative of the player base.
Oh yes.. one button mashers loved it the most because they could one shot everything and go afk in raids .. were you one of them? Oh yes, you have a guard.. never mind.. point made. For the rest of us who saw our beloved classes ripped to shred without any say in the matter did , in fact.. hate it. Whether you like it or not. Belittling them in a forum with a 'better then you attitude' is just rather.. lame. Because as a matter of fact, we ARE members of the community.. and all need to be heard.

[Leixy]

Truth be told U12 / Helm's Deep released with 2/3rds of the Epic Battle system not working, Epic Battles dropped gear for other classes, there was no barter epic battle gear. There was no new loot in classic raids till Update 12.1 Five weeks after HD's release, and that gear was under-whelming.

At that time, once you were Rank 6 in Epic Battles, players had to grind 6-7 epic battles at full platinum just to even get a chance at 1 Platinum box, and half the time the epic battle would bug and you wouldn't get plat. And the Platinum reward you did get was only a 1 in 12 chance of being the piece of gear you needed, and even more remote being a gold jewelry drop for the piece you needed. Also, only 1/3rd of the jewelry slots for epic battles even had gold jewels that potentially could drop.

i.e. the HD loot system was bogus.

Also, Update 13 was the nail in the coffin as it was 100% solo update with an extreme quest grind for gold recipes in Entwood.

Only after Turbine laid off half the staff of LotRO and changed Exec Producers did this game start turning around under Rowan & now Vyvyanne in July 2014, improved Epic Battle barter system, new instance cluster, new landscape group content, new landscape boss content via roving threats, new pvmp map (granted, that no one uses anymore because of poor design choices).

[Coeprandua]

Wonder why the place was a ghost town after HD then.. If players who didn't especially like the destruction of the classes weren't a representative of the player base.
Oh yes.. one button mashers loved it the most because they could one shot everything and go afk in raids .. were you one of them? Oh yes, you have a guard.. never mind.. point made. For the rest of us who saw our beloved classes ripped to shred without any say in the matter did , in fact.. hate it. Whether you like it or not. Belittling them in a forum with a 'better then you attitude' is just rather.. lame. Because as a matter of fact, we ARE members of the community.. and all need to be heard.

In my experience the majority of those people left before HD even came out. Some of them tried to come back for HD but they didn't quite like it. They left because the endgame in lotro became solo-oriented and consisted of daily quests (Wildermore), giving the game an anti-MMO feel. When they came back to check out HD, what they saw was skirms where you click soldiers and repair things, mobs hit for nothing, all of this with annoying bugs and a big price tag. So don't tell me it was the class revamps that drove people away.

[Jillymala]

In my experience the majority of those people left before HD even came out. Some of them tried to come back for HD but they didn't quite like it. They left because the endgame in lotro became solo-oriented and consisted of daily quests (Wildermore), giving the game an anti-MMO feel. When they came back to check out HD, what they saw was skirms where you click soldiers and repair things, mobs hit for nothing, all of this with annoying bugs and a big price tag. So don't tell me it was the class revamps that drove people away.

I think your perceptions, and perhaps your experiences with HD were not quiet the same as mine even though we are on the same server. The combination of things was the end for many people, you can clearly see that by the kins' massive attrition rate.

Your point was, That I highlighted very clearly, that the people who didn't care for the class changes were not a legitimate part of the player base. You are very wrong sir.

[Vulcwen]

Great post - not going to quote the whole thing. Just the bit where I think you have it wrong. Our side of this relationship never gets to decide. Early on in on-line games things were designed to let the client run the world the player was in, and just 'update' the server with the players progress and location. This led to people cheating. Proggies where made that could 'lie' to the server and report pretty much anything the player wanted.

As a result on line games had no choice but to make all the action be simultaneously run on the server and client - which does result in the behavior you describe and pretty much exactly as you describe. Player is running across a field and on approaching a fence jumps the fence. On the players client he see's himself successfully jump the fence and keep running. The client says wait -- I didn't see you jump that fence - I saw you run into that fence. The client puts you back at the fence. This happens regardless of the mode of transportation. However as you pointed out the war steed speed makes it happen much more often. But when the server gets bogged down it can happened any place.

As I said, the client decides within parameters checked by the server. If the client attempts to go outside these parameters, the server corrects.. additionally, in case of a knockback/fear the server has full control until that effect expires (it simply limits the position range to a single point).
Basically, giving the client some control over the position (and I believe full control over rotation, considering that is related to camera input), which in general situations means the server would accept the client's decisions most of the time, allows for a lag-free movement experience (as long as movement is accepted within a certain time).

[Beaniemooch]

Captain's had a good run with feedback during that time, but things that couldn't be squeezed in got abandoned when our point of contact was laid off, so I'm not sure your experience is typical. Besides, every MMOs players say they devs don't listen to players, I tend to think "players" have an overinflated view of their ability to balance things out, and how much of the community they actually represent.

Minstrels were flat out told by the dev she didn't have time to look at them release after release in beta. It came out at live basically how it went into beta with just a last-minute untested dps boost thrown in because we'd complained for weeks that we hit harder at level 30 than we did after the "balance" with the trait trees.

We parsed heals and dps. We got zero feedback other than "didn't have time again, we'll look at it next release/after live/at the first/second/fill-in-the-number update" but it never happened. There was zero back and forth during closed or open beta. I remember about 4 posts total from our dev-3 of which were "didn't get to you again". Zero response to feedback.

We need an overhaul and rebalancing. There are an incredible number of great discussions from back when HD went live in the minstrel forum. All are still valid.