The Squire, the sixth class, and the first balance pass

The Squire is in: the tank class, with double the Warrior’s HP and a third of the damage. Its job is to hold the boss on itself while the Mage and the Archer hit from range. Along with it came the first balance pass, based on measured numbers instead of guesses.

Why

The Warrior was labeled “front line”, but it didn’t hold anything: a mob always goes for whoever is closest, and without a taunt the Warrior was just a damage dealer with a bit more health. For group play to make sense, someone has to be the target on purpose. We decided to take that role away from the Warrior, who becomes heavy physical damage, and to create a class that does only that.

We also tested whether the class was really needed. With the old numbers, any character could stand on top of a legend for 30 seconds and survive. A tank is only worth it when the boss kills whoever isn’t one, so legend attacks now take 2 to 3 hits to kill a fragile character at the legend’s level.

How it works

The Squire uses a shield as a weapon and scales with VIT. It has 200 base HP and 20 per level, against the Warrior’s 120 and 12. The first job’s skills:

• Pancada de Escudo: a weak hit that applies the weapon’s aura and slows the target.
• Bramido: taunts for 8 seconds and gives a shield worth 15% of HP.
• Pele de Ferro: passive, +15% max HP.
• Firmar Posição: DEF times 1.5 for 6 seconds.
• Muralha: entry skill. When it comes onto the field through a swap, it taunts for 4 seconds and gains a 30% shield.

The two second-tier jobs are the Guardião (earth: area stomp, Bastião with a 10-second taunt, +20% HP) and the Sentinela (water: hits that paint the aura water so the partner can react with lightning or ice, and Ressaca, which slows everything around it).

Three new rules in the simulation:

• Threat: the distance a mob measures to each team is divided by the threat of the character on the field. The Squire has 1.6; everyone else has 1.0. It can stand a bit farther away than the Mage and still be the target.
• Between two players who have taunted, the most recent taunt wins.
• A taunt ends when whoever cast it leaves the field. Before, the taunt stayed on the team and the boss kept following the Mage who came in as a replacement. This also changes the Cavaleiro’s Provocar and the Paladino’s Escudo da Fé.

The balancing came from a new tool, tools/balance.sh, which runs the simulation headless and measures, for each class against each mob, the time to kill and the time to die. The first table showed the problem: at level 20, the Mage did 125 damage per second on the training dummy and the Warrior 41. The reason wasn’t how hard the hits were, it was MP. The Warrior had 30 MP and spent 5 per hit; it ran out after 6 hits and then sat waiting on a regeneration of half a point per second.

What changed:

Class	DPS before (level 20)	DPS after
Mage	125	108
Warrior	41	91
Rogue	48	91
Archer	46	75
Acolyte	69	58
Squire	15	25

Warrior, Rogue and Archer got more base MP (70, 60 and 70) and cheaper hits; Golpe Pesado now has a 1.2-second cooldown instead of 2. The Mage pays 5 MP per Projétil Arcano and Bola de Fogo dropped from 1.8 to 1.6. MP regeneration doubled: 1 per second on the field, 2 on the bench. Regular room mobs got 50% more health, because everyone was killing an imp in one hit, and room bosses got about 45% more, because a Warrior at the right level killed the Salamandra alone in 11 seconds.

The Squire’s emblem, the three shield icons and four skill icons came from the same generation flow as the other icons. The doll uses the LPC shield until the custom art arrives.

Next step

Custom Squire art (heavy armor, held shield and the hit effect) and testing the legends in a group with and without a tank.