So far I've coded three guilds, and currently I'm supervising a total of four guilds. Three of them rely more or less on skills for damage. So, this should be my area of expertise, so to say. (Probably isn't, but at least I'm trying!)

I've gathered people think stats and skills should affect more, damage-wise. I'm all in for this, but let's consider this a bit first.

If we take a skill, its maximum damage should be somewhere in the range of 200-300. Of course, depending on rounds it takes to use it, this value may differ. Now, a realistic damage for newbie-midbie could be something about 100-150. This gives us a pool of about 50-200 points of damage that is affected by stats, skills, equipment and whatnots.

Let's consider stats first. Newbie offtank can semi-easily get maybe 100 str. Midbie can maybe invest on some str-gear and get to 200. Highbies can get to 300 (or more), but they rarely bother with str, since pure damage gear is better for melee. Now, this means that str-difference of 200 points, the difference between newbie and highbie, factors into 50-200 damage difference. In worst case, this means that 4 str gives 1 damage, and best case is one damage per point of str.

Now, when we factor in the skills, the damage per stat point ratio gets even worse. A newbie is happy with 50% skill, midbies get the skill to 90% and highbies to 100%. If we consider the difference between midbie and highbie, it is minimal. Midbie with one guild almost maxed will get the skills about same level as highbie with three guilds, sometimes even higher. But back to the skills and their effect on damage. The damage affected by skills draws from the same pool of damage as stats, making the effect of stats smaller. So, now we're talking about best case scenario of less than one point of damage per point of stat.

Then comes in the equipment. Let's consider weapons. Let's say 200k sword does about 40 points of damage on average, and the highbie sword, worth many millions, does 60 points. I see two options: either make the weapon damage draw from the 50-200 point damage difference pool, or scale the whole damage according to weapon. Problem with first approach is that this makes the weapon's effect negligible, and the problem with latter one is that measly 2M buys you about as good a weapon as the best you can get, making only true newbies suffer.

Then there are the whatnots. By whatnots I mean reputation and other affecting stuff. They should be relatively visible, and if you are not going to make something totally unusable without high levels of reputation, the damage they give out is going to draw from the same pool as stats and skills, thus making the damage ratio even worse.

Of course, you can argue my stats are more or less Stetson-Harrison stats, or that I only considered one-stat skills, or one-skill skills. These are all valid points. My approach is far from perfect. Some of you may have also noticed I used linear approach. Good non-linear formulas are hard to come by, and are a mess to balance. Usually non-linearity makes the dam per stat ratio even worse at high stats. There is no easy fix for this - boons give about 55 points to a stat, which simply cannot give 55 points of damage to a skill.

You might also point out that maybe it's time to upgrade skill damages to give more room for various things to affect on the damage. It's all fine and dandy, but it also means that most monsters should get upgraded to maintain a resemblance of balance. It would also mean that other sources of damage should be updated. As I see it, it would be a lot of work, for very little gain.

My conclusion: Making a skill that works both for newbies and highbies, with enough allowance for stats and skills to affect things noticeably, is very hard. Nobody gets it right with the first try, thus making the wholescale damage tuning even harder. The pessimist in me says it's not even worth trying to re-scale all the skills, but optimist side says that just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

As I see it, being a highbie should be more about versatility and not about spamming one skill with repeat - what is the point of having larger pool of skills and spells, when it all boils down to minmaxing one of them. I do realize this versatility-thing isn't actually happening right now, but it is something we should strive to achieve.

++Heidel, preaching something he might or might not practice