I loved Earth and Beyond.

City of Heroes is the best example but it is a bit long in the tooth these days. I realize nobody wants to be dependent on a third type of class but I think a bit more depth could be added insteaad of just giving a few classes one or two crowd control abilities.

CoH: the controller archetype is the most powerful crowd control I have ever seen in an MMO. These guys are capable of locking down entire groups of enemy mobs.

EQ II: still has plenty of CC specialists, as pointed out above.

LoTRO: has not one but two classes that specialize in crowd control, the Loremaster and the Burgler.

Even in WoW, Mages, Warlocks, and Rogues all have powerful CC abilities. The difference is that in WoW there are few encounters where it is expected that you will have CC along. There are certainly individual instances where you are f-ed without true crowd control, but for the most part a decent multi target tank is all you need.

The loremaster in Lotro is also a decent CC class and Turbine have done a good job of keeping their abilities from being overpowered to the point of making content trivial when they are included into a group. In EQ2 a well played CC class makes the content completely trivial since is has been designed to make it playable for groups without a CC class in them.

My opinion is that CC has been reduced/eliminated from most modern MMOs because players did not want to be tied down to being forced into having a pure CC class as a necessity in a group. People are not patient when building groups anymore so content is designed to be managable without it, which makes it ridiculously easy with a CC class to control the content already designed to be doable without control.

EQ had some PvP servers, but it was always clear that this has limitations. I understand the wish for some pvp now and then, but we have seen in Ultima Online to what it lead, to an awful lot of restrictions and an empty world, Felucca, the pvp side. Strange, as every and his daughter loves pvp, which is “fun, neverending endgame content” ™ – which definitely is not true, as we have experienced.

I do not see pvp as a reason for the limitation of CC, though. Many stun abilities still exist, and are countered in their duration by “resilience” in WoW to some extent. They idea that stuns break once people take any or some damage is already incorporated in the FEAR mechanic of WoW, to some extent. Also in “sheeping”.

PvE gameplay and PvP are fundamentally different, and both game modes mix like oil and water, at least a japanese designer once said so, and I totally agree. Guild Wars is a prime example. PvE and PvP are so separated there, pvp only happens in controlled areas/arenas, but for a long time they shared the same skillset. So pve skills usually got nerfed for pvp reasons, and some interesting ideas could simply never ever be invented because of PvP.

The irony is that they recently made pvp and pve versions of the same skill. The PvE versions are usually grossly overpowered abominations. The designers seem to think this is what makes pve cool and what pve oriented players want. Oh my.

I wish they would finally get it and make a PVE game OR a PVP game, and not a problematic try to please everyone. And this not only in regards to Guild Wars 1/2.