kyros

congratulations, you get better at reading comprehension. go back a few pages and find out that my merged rogue was: assassin, brigand, swashbuckler.

your post is inaccurate though, because brigands and swashbucklers are comparable for survivability and debuffing, and all three are capable of solid dps numbers (not equivalent, perhaps, but they all do significant damage).

the point is to create limitations, but to also create actual variety. instead of having two chain wearing high melee dps classes (assassin/swash) and two debuff-centric melee dps classes (brigand/swash) that all use poisons... you end up with one class that can specialize in high dps or strong debuffs. then you can have a rogue that has the most crippling attacks without having the imbalancingly high dps output. or a rogue with high damage that doesn't have the solo survivability.

obviously, a successful raid will want both the debuff rogue and the dps rogue. survivability rogues would be more useful in solo, small group, and group play... while they could probably act as a fill-in tank on raid encounters gone bad.

edit: and finally to address itemization, the stats and basic things that all three spec's would want would be generally similar. strength, crits, melee skills. since eq2 devs seem to like a mold system, it's not so hard to have multiple options. one for the debuffing and dps rogues and then another one for the tanking rogue to choose that has extra parry and defense or hp in place of something else.

Emanji

Bad example, you can switch restaurant any time you want. You're not losing time and effort investing in your character like you do in EQ2.

BTW: wtf are you so piss off? it's not like hardcore raiders are blowing through your content. They're blowing through high-end raiding content, (AKA shit you will never see). They're complaining about their content, not yours. So why are you up in arms about shit that's not even your concern.

Ravanos

if they were bitching about raid content and trying to find ways to change it ... fine. They aren't they are bitching about the class system and trying to get rid of classes. I happen to like my inquisitor and don't want to be merged with a templar, i happen to be a swashy and don't want my swashy merged.

if anything I want the classes that need it to be revamped so they DO stand out so they aren't just "an evil cleric".

i tell you this with SoEs reputation if anyone even SNIFFS a major overhaul people will cancel before its even announced. you guys are funny you say "if done right this overhaul can save the game" when the fuck has SOE done anything right? and how can you say that when all you dimwits do is preach how bad the expansion is.

Naar

Reading all the various posts by those in favour of consolidation I can see that they appear to be under the delusion that merging two classes would mean the new single class would have the best of what the former classes had to offer.

Sony doesn't work that way, the way they do maths you would end up with -

1 + 1 = 2 :: 50% nerf required

You really want a Brawler or Shaman class that is a worse nerfed version of their former classes?

The other thing is that if you shunt all the defining features of, say, a wizard and warlock into an AA tree; you will end up with one hell of a gimped low level class.

Want to Nuke? Sorry you need to earn AA points

Want to hit in AE? Sorry you need to earn AA points

Sure I guess you guys care the least about the low levels, but gimped low level classes will only put off new players, no new players means less subscriptions and less people to potentially fill the gaps in your raids (when you have your next spat over some stupid issue and split the raiding guild)

Sony have a long history of adding to AA while removing from core abilities. The whole idea of class consolidation is simply a case of shuffling the deck chairs while the titanic continues to sink.

I've seen the suggestion that merging would allow a bard to respec to dirge or troub depending on what the raid needs, I would suggest that the raid learns how to make the most of what they can get and not rely on the same formula every time. Does your favourite sports team use the same tactics every game they play? No I didn't think so...

Gilgame

being a paladin, i dont really care what they do with other classes, paladin cant be merged with anything, if you tried to merge SK and Paladin you'd up up with a confusedknight or a retardadin, RoK's customization was a disapointment, when i heard they werent going to add in new AAs, i was immediately disappointed, when i heard they were adding only 1 new spell, i was further disappointed.

i guess what im trying to say is that this game needs more customization, if that means class consolidation then so be it.

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Crabbok

Agreed. Honestly I'd be happy if they left all classes as they are, and had unique loot for all, and awesome new spells for all, and Lots and lots of new AAs for all.... But we can see in RoK that there are alot of problems and delays associated with that.

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Euron Greyjoy

I want to play a retardadin!

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Grozmok :: Rallos Zek :: Shadowknight :: Wudan
Mazrim :: Guk :: Defiler :: Ne Plus Ultra
Euron :: Nagafen :: Mystic :: The Kraken, Onyx, Vae Victus
??? :: Red Eye Mountain :: Bright Wizard :: ???

Kuian

I think the problem is, or at least this is how I thought it was going to be, is that RoK was suppose to resolve a lot of these issues that we saw in KoS and EoF. With the release of a major expansion SOE had the ability to do some changing to make game play more enjoyable for all types of players.

Instead what they did was release a half assed product that has some major technical issues not to mention game content issues and now they are scrambling to go back and figure out what the hell they did and how the hell can it be fixed.

I got into beta at the end and read through the beta boards, the posts that were about how pretty the zones look and how good looking a piece of armor was were the threads that a dev responded to. A good combat issue or game mechanic issue thread on the other hand was largely ignored. What does that tell you...

Crabbok

Tells me they have alot to work on. I actually do care about how pretty a zone looks, but it's not my TOP concern. I do care though, I was very impressed visually with this expac.

Looking at the bright side, from a raiders point of view, This expac had an awful lot of raid content available upon release. This is great IMO. Yeah theres issues that need resolved, but I'll wait until LU 41 or 42 before I judge this expansion as a whole. Thats just the reality of things.

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Naar

A lot of quests were still giving out just coin at the end of beta. So you can't blame beta testers for quests with overpowered or wrong class rewards, they never got to test that.

The release was rushed out, even to the point that international customers had to wait up to a week for their box as there wasn't enough copies made to send out to EU distributors on time.

So lets see... the quests were not ready, the servers were not ready and production of the box's was not ready... who cares, lets just release anyway...