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Why so many classes anyway?
I have to agree with some of the posters in this forum in regards to the oversaturation EQII's retained through classes.
I have yet to understand the reasoning behind taking the classes of Everquest and practically doubling the majority of them, for no good reason other than for the sake of a world that was (once) suppose to be good versus evil.
This is my take on things.
Back in Everquest, most of the classes were detrimental to the game. You couldn't do things without warriors, without enchanters, without clerics, without teleports, without kiters, without fears, without snares, without specific group setups, the list continues.
In Everquest II on the other hand, you CAN do things without MOST of the classes. You don't need a crusader archetype at all, you also don't need a brawler archetype at all. In fact, you could do without a berserker, an inquisitor, an illusionist, a swashbuckler, a ranger, a warlock, another list I could continue with.
In my view, each class should carry with it something exceptionally detrimental to the development and game play of the players, on a universal level. If the EQII developers thought that by making 6 fighter archetypes for example so groups could always have a tank at their disposal, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Why can't those 6 people have all just played a warrior and be done with it? The tank archetypes deviate so little to begin with, and realistically they always have. Sure, one of them is stereotyped the best at tanking, while another is exceptional at single target damage per second, with a third being adept at keeping themselves alive in many instances without the need of secondary healing.
Big deal. The diversity of a class meant to "tank" should be just that. If you want to tank, you should be "the" tank, not "a" tank.
That's one of the bigger problems with this game, and one of the reasons that the World of Warcraft seems more appropriate for its 25 man raiding system than that of Everquest II's 24 man. In WoW, you have the Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Shaman, Druid, Paladin, Priest, Mage, and Warlock--that's it, 9 classes. EQII has TWENTY FOUR, holy crap!
What can you possibly do to balance out 24 individual classes without making them either too over or underpowered from their primary counterpart archetypes, or crafting a carbon copy of said parent class that's nearly unremarkable through any means to the "original"?
In WoW, a Warrior is the tank. A Paladin can tank and a Druid in bear form can tank, but the Warrior IS the tank. A Paladin can also heal, and not just like the secondary healing of the paladin in EQII, but well enough that they can in fact fit a primarily healing situation without taking over the job of another healer class in its entirety.
I think a lot of that has nothing to do with how great WoW is or isn't, or how poorly done the class system is in EQII, but by the mere number of classes each game entails.
There are only so many abilities you can give players in an online game like this. If I can do 380 different things that you can't do, well, if we had 24 classes and divided it by 380 each, that would be one hell of a ridiculous dilemma for the content developers to deal with. Mobs would have to be ready with thousands of abilities to counter everything a player could utilize. Because of that single feature, players have a distinct number of skills unique to their individual class, out of a total number of powers slated throughout the game as a whole.
This means the game might have 300 abilities total (just throwing this out there for simplicity purposes), but with 24 classes instead of 8, we divide 300 by 24 and 300 by 8 to get 13 and 38 (rounded up), respectively.
What does this mean to you? To me it means when my mmo of choice has 24 classes in it, most of my abilities are going to be carbon copies of another classes skills. I'm not going to have 38 abilities; I'm probably going to have 13 of my own. So what was the point? If I have 13 skills out of 38, and another class very similar to my own has only 13, but we share the other 12, that seems a little narrow minded of the development. Those classes could just be condensed into one; not only would it give both of those players more diversity when they play by offering them a larger skill pool, but it's bound to make that new class more detrimental to other players as well.
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