Hi everyone! My group and I are working on putting together a homebrew rebalancing of the classes for RtL to take into account the very different balance level for coop-play, and the first step to this is deciding which classes are strong and weak, relatively. I'd like to get some community feedback before moving past here, so I'm putting up what we think the class balance is like and asking for discussion to help correct the list.
This takes into account a number of factors:
- Damage, healing, and support are much more important than control and applying/removing conditions such as stun, immobilize, etc.
- Aoe attacks are massively more effective, even with the RtL damage nerf to them
- Conversely, multi-target attacks that were designed to hit many monsters even when the OL is spreading them out (and had high costs to account for this) are less effective compared to cheaper aoe since they are equally affected by damage halving.
- Overlord deck manipulation skills are useless
- Search deck skills are less useful (since they don't affect how much gold you earn)
- Some skills/tactics become more or less effective when there isn't an OL intentionally focusing a specific player (e.g. group heals, etc.)
WARRIORS
Very Strong:
Berserker (whirlwind and counterattack are very powerful in RtL), Knight (already was strong, tanking is more useful in RtL)
Strong:
Beastmaster (familiars more useful without a competent OL)
Normal:
Champion, Skirmisher
A little weak:
Marshal (Overlord deck manipulation skills don't work)
MAGES
Very Strong:
Conjurer (OL isn't controlling the images, so prismatic strike is very strong), Geomancer (can use stones to block large creatures out of combat with no OL to intelligently clean them), Hexer (without an intelligent OL to play around it, plague cloud is far too effective, esp. with Seer Kel)
Strong:
Runemaster (cheap blasts are very useful), Necromancer (familiars more useful without a competent OL)
SCOUTS
Strong:
Treasure Hunter (was very strong, but search deck manip is not quite as useful now), Shadow Walker (monsters easily group around shadow soul for debuff, and hit the shadow souled target whose defense is buffed
Normal:
Bounty Hunter, Thief, Wildlander
Weak:
Stalker (was already weak, RtL didn't help)
HEALERS
Very Strong:
Disciple (extremely high raw healing, prayer of peace is too strong against rtl ai), Bard (group healing is more useful in rtl than against an OL)
Strong:
Apothecary (high damage output, limited spike healing is not as much of a balancing factor in rtl)
Normal:
Spiritspeaker
Weak:
Prophet (numerous skills that are not as effective when not fighting an OL)