GoofyWarriorGuy said:In Pantheon we need to remember that, unlike EQ1, Druids and Shamans are meant to be main healers in groups. So having a Shaman and a Cleric in the same group is a redundancy. You might still do it if your fighting really hard content that needs 2 strong healers, but you wouldn't likely run 2 healers consistantly all the time.
While one might think that on the surface for the Shaman and Cleric, the Shaman and Druid have several complementary abilities.
Druid has Call Lightning where, if the target is wet, becomes a guaranteed critical strike. The Shaman has Deluge which not only has a snare component and disrupting health regeneration but also makes the target wet.
The key difference with Pantheon healers is that they actually have decent damage output. By having both a Shaman and Druid, they split the healing duties which then opens the class to using other parts of their class for the benefit of the group. You do get a bit more safety and security with two healers with a negligible decrease in overall DPS. I would suspect that being relegated only to healing would be less interesting that being able to explore more of what you class can bring to a group if you had a second healer present.
Friends, competent players, the usual caveats...
That being said, I'm interested in seeing how a DL, DRU, SHA, MNK, ENC, ROG group does.
With a good monk on pulls, the ENC may not be needed for CC except in the 'oh $#%&' moments and could focus on regen and other buffs/debuffs/damage. I think this might be a good set up for a solid, but safe, group whether chain pulling a camp or crawling through a dungeon. Perhaps with the ROG's S&M ability, the ENC could be replaced with a SUM, WIZ, or RNG for additional DPS, but then you lose the regen, so maybe not. The BRD would also be interesting, but we still know nothing about the class other than CC. There are still a lot of abilities we haven't seen and I've not played the game yet, so I'll just have to wait.
6 fire focused wizards, no mdd problems
In EQ1, casters didnt make the best groups for xping. Necros took too long to load DoTs, wizards were too spikey and had to therefore wait until mob was like 85% before attacking, mage pets AI wasnt always reliable.. hopefully these issues are resolved.
EQ1 best endgame xp group was Bard, ranger, rogue, rogue, cleric, warrior.
Bard had CC/slow/mana regen/attack buffs/damage shield on tank.. and pulling ability.. but ideally you arent pulling and instead the warrior is crawling the group forward from camp to camp and tanking 2 or 3 things at a time. Ranger attack buffs and damage shield plus bard attack buffs and damage shield, plus long lasting shaman buffs from out of the group.. on a melee group.. who has a tank multitanking with damage shield.. is winning.
Vandraad said: The key difference with Pantheon healers is that they actually have decent damage output. You do get a bit more safety and security with two healers with a negligible decrease in overall DPS.
Can you site where you got this idea from? I've seen no mention that 'Healers will have decent damage output.'
Vandraad said: Druid has Call Lightning where, if the target is wet, becomes a guaranteed critical strike. The Shaman has Deluge which not only has a snare component and disrupting health regeneration but also makes the target wet.
As I mentioned before... these kinds of synergies, while they work in all cases, are going to see their common usage in multi-group content.
You have to remember the lesson that is learned over the years in regards to class balance. It is never good if classes are able to do everything well. I imagine that in some peoples vision, the Shaman can both heal, do decent damage, and can have his pet tanking. But if this were the case, this would make that class the OP class which nobody could compete with. That Shaman could likely solo most content, and would be a must have for every single group.
If your idea of 'negligible decrease in overall dps' were true, there would be very little drive to include dps'ers into your group at all. Why not just bring 1 tank and 5 healers. Sure your dps will be a slight bit slower, but your chance of dying goes totally out the window and the game becomes easy mode. Do you really think VR is going to balance it this way?
Even in games such as World of Warcraft where a class could fill all roles, they can't do it all at the same time, you have to pick your spec and then that's what you had for that fight. You couldn't be tanking, dps'ing and healing all in the same fight. Of course we know Pantheon will not have specs so that's not going to ever going to be the case anyway.
The point is though that when you deal with the 'Trinity' or in this case the 'Quadrinity' your classes are specialized to a specific function and will not be able to compete in regards to the other functions. Shamans, Druids and Clerics will never be able to closely compete with a true DPS class when doing damage. Will those synergies allow them to do some damage during the time they are not being forced to heal? Of course it will, but that damage is never going to be a main function they are brought into the group for.
It's the same with the Paladin. Yes he has heals in his Kit, but you would never expect a Paladin to step into the healer role for any group. His heals will help out of course, but he would never be able to do anywhere near the healing that the true healers do. And you would never suggest 'when the healer goes low on mana the Paladin can take over', it just wouldn't work. He might be able to keep somebody alive for a few extra seconds until the healer can get some mana for another heal, but he's never going to off-fill that role.
Also with the Enchanter, he does have dps abilities as well, and in many cases he will be blasting away when he's not doing his crowd control and debuffing the targets. But you aren't going to see the Enchanters competing on the meters (ack did I just bring up dmg meters... don't kill me) with the true dps'ers.
There is only 1 class in the entire list of classes that has listed any kind of carry over into another role, and that is Monk being able to 'off-tank'. There is no classes listed as 'Off-dps' or 'Off-Heal'. I believe that with the Monk class they only have built in some tankiness because the thought was they are going to be pullers and might need to be able to survive some hits as they pull mobs to the group. So since they will have some of these survival type things that Tanks normally have, they decided to list them as potential 'off-tanks'. But I do not believe they are ever meant to main tank for a normal group, and have no hope of being able to tank any sort of boss type encounter for very long at all. And it's quite possible that Monk's dps might actually be balanced slightly less than the other dps classes to compensate for their survivalist factor.
And if testing suggests that there won't need to be a class built for pulling then we may find the Monk class being re-tuned to not needing the tankiness and losing that option of 'off-tank'.
Vandraad said: I would suspect that being relegated only to healing would be less interesting that being able to explore more of what you class can bring to a group if you had a second healer present.
VR is not going to balance the game so that whole parts of a classes ability kit are only usable when they have somebody else along to cover for their other part. The game will be tuned so that 1 healer will still be able to do other things than just heal in a group, even while keeping up his healing duties.
So one of the downsides to the streams that we have been seeing so far is that none of the players are really good at it yet. Even in those cases where people have said "Soandso played classname exellently" I have found myself rolling my eyes wondering at what level people are at if they think that the streamers were being exellent. Don't get me wrong, some of them did well and I wouldn't call them bad players, but they are still very much caught up with the excitement of what's going on to truely focus on playing their toon to it's fullest. Even the ones who had experience in the roles they chose still were not to the calibire of what we will see once they are playing for real after launch (or at least after lots of practice in Alpha and Beta).
Most of the time the Healers in these groups have been very poor with their mana management (only a few of them sat down to meditate even once during fights), and as such they find very quickly that using spells outside of healing to use up their mana too quickly and they quickly stop doing it. But once players truely start to learn their classes (usually done best by actually leveling up that class from lvl 1) you will find that Healers are not going to always be stuck to just the healing parts of their kits. They will assist with some of the more 'support' and 'utility' parts of their class as well. And they won't need an extra healer along in order to do so.
Now with all that said... let me take your side slightly.
I do not think that if you do bring an second healer this is going to make your group unplayable. You will still be able to progress if you stack a second healer in your group instead of a dps or true cc/support. The game will be balanced to allow for these kinds of non-traditional or non-optimal groups. I also think that in some cases these odd group makeups may actually bring some interesting gameplay and style of play that we might not expect. So I'm not saying "Your group decisions won't work". What I'm saying is that "Your group decisions are not going to be the common practice due to min-max type mentality".
So feel free to build your groups in various ways with redundancies or even with limitations and you can still have fun. I'm just trying to point out that your ideas that Healers are going to be DPSers is not what the quadrinity is really about.
Defector said:EQ1 best endgame xp group was Bard, ranger, rogue, rogue, cleric, warrior.
Bard had CC/slow/mana regen/attack buffs/damage shield on tank.. and pulling ability.. but ideally you arent pulling and instead the warrior is crawling the group forward from camp to camp and tanking 2 or 3 things at a time. Ranger attack buffs and damage shield plus bard attack buffs and damage shield, plus long lasting shaman buffs from out of the group.. on a melee group.. who has a tank multitanking with damage shield.. is winning.
Lol, what part of endgame are you referring to, as in what era of eq. Because with this group you have no haste other than the bard which means your losing a song. Your cleric will end up running oom far to much.
You can use bard aoe snare/slow but it's much much much less effective than having a shaman in the group.
Also. You can build a group and then be like oh yeah, we also get shaman buffs even though we don't have a shaman.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:
I'm confused why you don't see the value in cleric and shaman. The shamans job in the group is not to dps. His job is to haste/buff the melee (making them more dps) and slow the mobs (mitigating the damage they do.
If he can do all of that and still toss some dots, we'll that's a bonus.
His secondary role is to ensure there's no downtime. If the cleric has to burn mana on a boss fight... the shaman can take over heals until the cleric is ready. If the cleric has to med every 35 pulls... you don't have to stop killing because the shaman can take over.
I'm not saying at all that you NEED 2 healers to he effective in this game, but were talking about ideal group composition. And this is what has my vote.
War, Clr, Shm, Rog, Rog, Rog.
By that notion, even though three rogues will be near impossible to get together for most people and the fact that you actually lose DPS from replacing the Support role with a rogue, let's just go balls to the wall and make an AE group.
Three Enchanters, two Wizards and a Cleric. Have the Wizards pull mobs into the stun web which Enchanters can do in Pantheon, then when the web has the required amount, either 10-50, the Wizards unleash their Fire PBAE nuke. I hope there are controls on that because as is now, it may be very much a real thing and if so, that will be, by far the best group composition for exp.
Porygon said:Lol, what part of endgame are you referring to, as in what era of eq. Because with this group you have no haste other than the bard which means your losing a song. Your cleric will end up running oom far to much.
You can use bard aoe snare/slow but it's much much much less effective than having a shaman in the group.
Also. You can build a group and then be like oh yeah, we also get shaman buffs even though we don't have a shaman.
The 'middle' expansions. Sorry I mean like OP geared endgame group.. when your tank and cleric have so much hp/mana that you dont need slows anymore, you instead want max damageshield on the tank and minimal slows for maximum damage. Bard/ranger/and self clicky damageshields was around 550 damage a hit? That means I was doing like 1500 dps with damageshield alone... plus max AA(aka max riposte damage) and endgame weps. The cleric was fine~ One of our clerics never sat, I dont know how he did it. And everyone had haste/clarity leftover from raid or logged in hydra chanter or shaman for rebuffs when needed.
I guess theres a difference between the question,
best 6 man group(fastest? safest? fun?.. 'best' is so arbitrary)
or fastest xp group(not arbitrary)
I personally think something like Paladin, Druid, Bard, Enchanter, and any of the melee DPS will be a strong makeup given the synergy I have seen so far with some of the class abilities (assuming Bard will be similar to EQ1). Druid's primary buff giving all other player's heals a boost, druid and paladin having group heals (and likely the BRD), druid having targeted AoE heals, enchanter (and likely bard) having resource replenishment. It looks as though all 3 of the melee DPS will have pulling capabilities so one of the 3 melee DPS can chain pull and monk can even offtank if FD pull fails and rogue/brd/enc/ranger/paladin can't CC for some reason. Also assuming Enchanter and BRD will have hastes that can stack (this is an assumption). Having 4 melee allows the Druid's targeted AoE HoT do its work without having to waste a lot of mana due to everyone being ranged.
In EQ1 I found that having a shaman solely for haste/slow over the enchanter was not a good trade. The enchanter slow was only 5% worse than the SHM but their haste was 20% better, and the benefit of the caster's resource regeneration (Clarity line) was superior to melee attribute buffs even if your only casters were one healer and the enchanter. With BRD + Enchanter + equipment most melee would be at haste cap which dramatically increased DPS.
With that said, this is all speculation without knowing how the BRD is even going to perform (or any of the classes really). This is just my opinion based on EQ1 and what we've gotten to see from the class reveals so far. Basically Druid will increase all other character's healing abilities and just constant group heal with Bard/Pal/Druid and Enc for CC and resource replenishment... If the druid heals aren't enough, replace one of the melee dps with a melee cleric because it looks as though the cleric is trying to be designed to be a melee combatant and they will likely never need to sit to regain mana with all of the passive healing and resource regen.
Edit/Add: And to those who think that theorycrafting class skill and synergy or discussing group make up is "Min/Maxing" then you may be in for a rude awakening. When you start causing people to die because you aren't fulfilling the role of the group that you were invited for and wind up OOM or wasting the healer's mana due to circumstances that you could have avoided (because you're trying to be a DPS SHM, or a tanking RGR) you will either change your playstyle or likely be labeled by the community as a "bad player". You will be able to get away with it for the first few months of the game until everyone starts learning the capabilities of other classes and being able to diferentiate from players that know what they are doing or accept and learn from constructive critisicm and players that don't want to learn to improve (a.k.a. "max"imize their potential).
Porygon said:Defector said:EQ1 best endgame xp group was Bard, ranger, rogue, rogue, cleric, warrior.
Bard had CC/slow/mana regen/attack buffs/damage shield on tank.. and pulling ability.. but ideally you arent pulling and instead the warrior is crawling the group forward from camp to camp and tanking 2 or 3 things at a time. Ranger attack buffs and damage shield plus bard attack buffs and damage shield, plus long lasting shaman buffs from out of the group.. on a melee group.. who has a tank multitanking with damage shield.. is winning.
Lol, what part of endgame are you referring to, as in what era of eq. Because with this group you have no haste other than the bard which means your losing a song. Your cleric will end up running oom far to much.
You can use bard aoe snare/slow but it's much much much less effective than having a shaman in the group.
Also. You can build a group and then be like oh yeah, we also get shaman buffs even though we don't have a shaman.
I'd like to point out that in EQ1 the Bard's songs were vastly more effective when instruments were used. The epic increased all songs by (18) which made the Bard's slow 63% atk speed, 110% movement speed, lower AGI by 90 (which lowered AC) and also decrease AC by 34 with just one song... not to mentioni that the proc immediately capped the group's ATK speed (With a 3 sec cast time that lasted 10 seconds (allowing 3 other songs to easily be played and still maintain slow) and cost no resource) So with that said, the SHM slow was 75% and cost 250 mana. I wouldn't say that the SHM slow was "much much more effective" (Before the BRD gets the epic the SHM is much more effective because the SSS is the only instrument that increases "singing" in the early years of EQ; but the poster said "end game")
edit: Epic Bard in Kunark/Velious era can slow the main target, charm a pet for huge DPS boost, mez 2 other NPCs and max the party's haste with dance of the blade (assuming they don't have a haste buff) without breaking a sweat unless they get a missed note (fizzle), get stunned or get resists which are obstacles that all casters have to manage (although the Bard's didn't use any resources).
Avaen said: I'm not sure if AOE stuns will work yet. The Enchanter stun is a 1 second cast that lasts for 5 seconds on a 20 second cooldown. Even with three enchanters you'd have 5 seconds of chaos. Do wizards get an AOE stun?
I see the stuns as a stop-gap measure to buy just enough time to get things under control. I could be wrong, but I think mez is instant. So 5 seconds is quite a long time to stop incoming damage and get mezzes out.
Parascol said:Avaen said: I'm not sure if AOE stuns will work yet. The Enchanter stun is a 1 second cast that lasts for 5 seconds on a 20 second cooldown. Even with three enchanters you'd have 5 seconds of chaos. Do wizards get an AOE stun?I see the stuns as a stop-gap measure to buy just enough time to get things under control. I could be wrong, but I think mez is instant. So 5 seconds is quite a long time to stop incoming damage and get mezzes out.
Oh right, you could AOE Mez too. Do we have information on AOE mez yet? I'm not sure. That'd be tricky but it'd be fun to theorycraft.
I'm really curious how the relative balance between the DPS classes will turn out. I hope that all classes with the DPS role will be quite comparable in their damage...I don't like the idea of "second class DPS". At least from what we know now, all DPS classes will have more utility than their EQ predecessors - so the argument "But my class brings nothing but DPS so it should be top" will be lessened.
I think all of the roles will have classes that are superior to others. Warrior will "likely" be the strongest tank for "most" situations, cleric for healer role, wizard for ranged DPS, Enchanter for CC and probably rogue for melee DPS. Its been stated that the classes will not have a perfect balance between them. My concern is the exclusion of classes for their roles later in the game (I'm only concerned about the DL so far actually since even the devs have said that they are difficult to heal compared to other tanks due to their lack of dmg mitigation).
Darch said:I think all of the roles will have classes that are superior to others. Warrior will "likely" be the strongest tank for "most" situations, cleric for healer role, wizard for ranged DPS, Enchanter for CC and probably rogue for melee DPS. Its been stated that the classes will not have a perfect balance between them. My concern is the exclusion of classes for their roles later in the game (I'm only concerned about the DL so far actually since even the devs have said that they are difficult to heal compared to other tanks due to their lack of dmg mitigation).
Yes, this definitely runs the risk of exclusion and is concerning.
VR saying there won't be perfect balance sounds like them just covering their butts, though. NO MMO has perfect balance. But I do think it's important to balance as much as possible, or you will end up with situations where Player A makes a character that is Class A and Class A happens to be deemed as the "worst" at whatever role, so they can't find any groups.
I'm kind of hoping each tank class will be viable, but maybe more efficient for certain areas based on each class. It kind of sounds like this is where they are trying to take this. The challenge with the direlord is that I don't know if we'll see much content that consists of all magic user mobs. The same will be true for the warrior if their damage mitigation is enhanced versus melee damage. My guess is that this will matter more for boss / raid encounters, but overland content each tank will be viable regardless of the mob type. I'm curious to learn more about this. So long as I can choose any 3 and tank regular group content, I'll be happy.
Darkintellect said:By that notion, even though three rogues will be near impossible to get together for most people and the fact that you actually lose DPS from replacing the Support role with a rogue, let's just go balls to the wall and make an AE group.
Three Enchanters, two Wizards and a Cleric. Have the Wizards pull mobs into the stun web which Enchanters can do in Pantheon, then when the web has the required amount, either 10-50, the Wizards unleash their Fire PBAE nuke. I hope there are controls on that because as is now, it may be very much a real thing and if so, that will be, by far the best group composition for exp.
The question wasn't what's realistically going to be put together on a daily basis. It what just about group comp. How you figure you lose dps by not bringing a support class in?
Also, aoe groups were efficient for like 2 expansions in eq. After that it was widely more efficient to actually kill mobs.
I would pit my group comp against an aoe group anyday.
Darch said:I'd like to point out that in EQ1 the Bard's songs were vastly more effective when instruments were used. The epic increased all songs by (18) which made the Bard's slow 63% atk speed, 110% movement speed, lower AGI by 90 (which lowered AC) and also decrease AC by 34 with just one song... not to mentioni that the proc immediately capped the group's ATK speed (With a 3 sec cast time that lasted 10 seconds (allowing 3 other songs to easily be played and still maintain slow) and cost no resource) So with that said, the SHM slow was 75% and cost 250 mana. I wouldn't say that the SHM slow was "much much more effective" (Before the BRD gets the epic the SHM is much more effective because the SSS is the only instrument that increases "singing" in the early years of EQ; but the poster said "end game")
edit: Epic Bard in Kunark/Velious era can slow the main target, charm a pet for huge DPS boost, mez 2 other NPCs and max the party's haste with dance of the blade (assuming they don't have a haste buff) without breaking a sweat unless they get a missed note (fizzle), get stunned or get resists which are obstacles that all casters have to manage (although the Bard's didn't use any resources).
I know how effective bards can be. The issue with aoe slowing on a bard is that in kunark and velious the aggro pulled from aoe slowing multiple mobs was too much for most warriors to deal with quickly. The bard would end up soaking heals which would run the cleric oom quickly. Aoe snare on the other hand was very minimal aggro. Which is why you keep the shaman around. To be honest most mobs in kunark and velious didn't even need to be slowed, it just allowed for a more laid back healing pace for the cleric.
A bard in this group would aoe snare. Overhaste and mana song, along with mezzing any adds that come in that are annoying (casters/healers) with warrior tanking cleric healing and max dps you would typically leave melee adds un mezzed.
Darch said:In EQ1 I found that having a shaman solely for haste/slow over the enchanter was not a good trade. The enchanter slow was only 5% worse than the SHM but their haste was 20% better, and the benefit of the caster's resource regeneration (Clarity line) was superior to melee attribute buffs even if your only casters were one healer and the enchanter. With BRD + Enchanter + equipment most melee would be at haste cap which dramatically increased DPS
This is incorrect. The shaman buffs will generate a nice increase in dps from the melee and clarity is not needed. The cleric is the only member of the group who would benefit from clarity and with the shaman there to take over heals it's not needed. The shaman will always have 80+m given canni and hots and the cleric for the most part will only be ch'ing. Clarity is just not needed.
I know that a lot of people really respect and cherish the eq1 enchanter. But they are not a part of a coordinated efficient group. I think I said it before an enchanter can make a bad group good... but doesn't bring anything to the table to a group that's already great.
Defector said:The 'middle' expansions. Sorry I mean like OP geared endgame group.. when your tank and cleric have so much hp/mana that you dont need slows anymore, you instead want max damageshield on the tank and minimal slows for maximum damage. Bard/ranger/and self clicky damageshields was around 550 damage a hit? That means I was doing like 1500 dps with damageshield alone... plus max AA(aka max riposte damage) and endgame weps. The cleric was fine~ One of our clerics never sat, I dont know how he did it. And everyone had haste/clarity leftover from raid or logged in hydra chanter or shaman for rebuffs when needed.
Ahhhhhh most people on these forums never bring up anything past pop. So I tend to never consider that era of eq when discussing things. I'm not too familiar with group comps from level 75+ but I know anything pre 75 was a mixture of the comp I listed with rog and mnk being interchangeable with whatever melee dps was excelling. Rangers and berserkers both had their days at times.
Porygon said: I'm not saying at all that you NEED 2 healers to he effective in this game, but were talking about ideal group composition. And this is what has my vote. War, Clr, Shm, Rog, Rog, Rog.
I accept that this is your opinion and I'm not likely going to change it, but I disagree with the premise that a 2 healer group on normal content is ever going to be your ideal group. Cleric + Shaman combo in EQ might have been really great, but in Pantheon since the shaman is balanced around being a pure healer and not a pure support like he was in EQ this means the combo is not going to be as OP in Pantheon.
Porygon said: I'm confused why you don't see the value in cleric and shaman. The shamans job in the group is not to dps. His job is to haste/buff the melee (making them more dps) and slow the mobs (mitigating the damage they do.)
Unlike others in this thread who are suggesting using the second healer to replace one of the dps, what you are suggesting is that the second healer (in this case Shaman) replaces the CC/Support class in your group.
Just as with the point that healers will never compete with a dps in regards to dps, it should be noted that it's likely that healers support abilities will not compete with a pure support class (ie Enchanter or Bard). Yes Shamans get a haste buff, and yes Shamans get debuffs that will lower overall dps from the enemy. But I'm pretty sure that Shaman haste will be lower than Enchanter haste, and Shaman will have less debuffs than Enchanters will. I do think that those classes buffs and debuffs will complement each other, so if you had both an Enchanter and a Shaman in a raid group their bufffs and debuffs will synergize and both be useful, but I think in a 1 group (ie 6 players) if you sacrifice the enchanter in order to have the shaman, you will have less buffage and debuffage (are those words) for that individual group.
Porygon said: His secondary role is to ensure there's no downtime. If the cleric has to burn mana on a boss fight... the shaman can take over heals until the cleric is ready. If the cleric has to med every 35 pulls... you don't have to stop killing because the shaman can take over.
This is also a replacement for the Enchanter role in the group. This feature of the enchanter has actually been spoken about several times in the streams. They have damage spells that specifically splash mana onto the group. So you want to have the shaman in the group to 'cover' for the Cleric when he gets low on mana, but you sacrifice the enchanter who's presence would feed the Cleric extra mana and help make sure his downtime is minimized.
As I said at the end of my last post; I'm not trying to say that having a secondary healer in your group is not going to work ever. And there will be some overlap in abilities (like buffs and debuffs) that allow you to have some of those things even when the pure support may not be available. You are not going to be SOL just because you can't find an enchanter for your group, or if you are short dps, and use a second healer instead. But my point has always been that from the way VR has been explaining the class balance in regards to the Quadrinity, it should always be most efficient for 1 group to have all 4 of these class types in the group.
You may still have lots of fun with your chosen group makeup and you may be able to find ways to make it excell in some situations and you could focus your gameplay in areas where those situations are more common. I'm not trying to tell you how to play. I'm just saying that your choice to stack a second healer is not how the game is balanced (at this time, since things could change) to be most effective in most situations.
Slight Topic Change - but still on the main thread point of party makeup.
Darch said: I think all of the roles will have classes that are superior to others.
If you are just saying this in the vein of "No matter how you try to balance, there is always going to be one that will be best" then I understand and I have no problem with your sentiment. BUT, if you are suggesting that VR balance the game so that one class will be superior in each role... then this here is a recipie for disaster. Any game that deliberately balances classes to be unbalanced in their role is going to have a huge problem.
Darch said: Warrior will "likely" be the strongest tank for "most" situations, cleric for healer role, wizard for ranged DPS, Enchanter for CC and probably rogue for melee DPS.
I think that what you are hitting on here is the idea of a baseline class, not a best class. The baseline idea is that one of the classes for a role will be the middle ground for basic content. So no matter what the enemy is, the Baseline class will do pretty well. But once you get into exotic enemy types the baseline class doesn't get any major advantages or disadvantages. This means that these kinds of baseline classes will be easier to play, and won't require any kind of 'Finesse' in their play to either take advantage of those advantagers or mitigate those disadvantages that others classes might have.
This does not make them better at their role, but rather makes them simpler to play in that role.
Where this makes a difference is when you are doing a random group and factor in choosing who you invite to this group. If you know that Warrior is easier to play than a Dire Lord in exotic situations, and you are expecting some exotic situations, and you are worried about how skillful a random player that you don't know might be, you may lean towards inviting a Warrior because if the player is less talented than you hope, it won't be as impactful overall than if you have a less talented Dire Lord.
This may not actually be true, but the 'fear' of this might cause players to avoid those finesse classes in PUGs. Which leads into your next point.
Darch said: Its been stated that the classes will not have a perfect balance between them. My concern is the exclusion of classes for their roles later in the game (I'm only concerned about the DL so far actually since even the devs have said that they are difficult to heal compared to other tanks due to their lack of dmg mitigation).
Any statement of 'classes will not be perfectly balanced' is not the same as saying 'one class will be balanced to be better than another'. The mechanics of classes will make them deal with situations differently, and may also cause other players to need to deal with that class differently as well.
You reference Dire Lords being difficult to heal, but the devs never actually said that it's more difficult to keep a Dire Lord alive. The part that was being talked about was the healer knowing when and how to heal; because Dire Lords do a lot of self healing and so their Health bar will tend to bounce as you watch them fight. They take some damage then they heal some damage, repeat... This yo-yo type effect on the Dire Lord health bar does not mean they are harder to keep alive, it just means that the healer needs to adjust their healing strategy and pay attention to when a big heal is needed vs when a smaller heal or heal over time will be sufficient.
Now, when you deal with exotic type situations the Dire Lords ability kit might call for him to adjust his play style to compensate. For example, if you fight an enemy that just hits very fast for small amounts of damage, the Dire Lords ability to self heal chunks of damage back make things much easier for him. On the other hand if you deal with a very slow hitting enemy but those hits are huge all at once, the Dire Lord may need to drop out of his normal rotation and instead time his self healing or damage reduction abilities to be used right before or after those big hits land. His style of play changes.
Also the Healer may change their healing on the Dire Lord in those situations. Sometimes a couple heal over times will complement the Dire Lords self healing and keep him topped up, but on other fights a more proactive large heal may need to be timed and pre-cast to land just after those Large hits do. This doesn't make him more difficult to heal, but rather just means you may need to think more about how you are going to heal him as situations change.
Which brings us back to your point... which I will quote again.
Darch said: My concern is the exclusion of classes for their roles later in the game
Your point tho is valid, that this type of thing might cause some players to say "I don't want the hassle of dealing with things as they change, so I'll just pick an easy class to play with" and some of those finesse type classes might get avoided. You may just need to focus on finding those players who do enjoy challenging gameplay and love to deal with those exotic styles of play and you won't run into this 'lazy man' type of attitude where 'baseline is best'.
Regardless I'm assuming the game will be fun no matter which classes you end up grouped with :-)