#{ why are we nerfing Roman servants

[dunscaiith]

     Where the actual fuck are Rider Julius Caesar and Saber Augustus Caesar???

[asuccessfulbusinessman]

Fate Grand Order should be used as a textbook case of bad game design - of a developer still trying to figure out what works in their Gacha game RPG.

Sure, there are obvious cases for ire - why did it take so long to implement a back button? Why is there a baseline star weight added to a random card? Why are so many traits and game mechanics obstructed from the player? Why are crit stars wholly dependant on 3 values (star weight, star drop rate, and hit count) the player can’t see? Why is the scale of any given buff not told to the player? Merlin. (And the conundrum of being unable to nerf him because whales, even though leaving him as is breaks the game).

Today I want to look at... early class design. Now, it’s no surprise that vanilla servants... kind of sucked - with a few exceptions. Most ‘charm’ skills had high cooldowns and low success rates, debuff success rate and debuff resistance was still considered a plus, skill seal, anti-roman damage on a defensive servant, some servants only had two skills, intuition left some servants with only two skills... and FGO ‘remedied’ this with strengthening quests - fixing poor initial design with a skill that - at the most - fixes one of their problems for 1-3 turns. (not all servants get rank up quests, and oftentimes a servant’s problem is too big to fix with a band-aid - Astolfo).

However, they at least addressed this problem. Another problem with FGO is the class system - more specifically that all “support” servants are casters - god forbid I want to build a defensive team against riders. Furthermore, why the hell do riders have such a high star weight when most of them have no crit synergy whatsoever? And don’t get me started on the whole “class damage modifier.”

Classes that describe what a servant will usually do would be fine and dandy if we didn’t have class advantage/disadvantage. Early game, most players likely had trouble against lancer enemies - as decent saber servants were pretty rare. But even people with stacked Chaldeas still run into problems with class advantage - mostly because the cavalry classes are rarely decent attackers. You’re not fighting against an encounter - half the time you’re fighting against the class advantage - plain and simple.