In a genre based around massive, sweeping changes it can be fun to speculate on a future that will never come. Today I want to address a hypothetical solution to a very real problem: class glut. EverQuest II, for as much as I love it, simply has too many classes. By having so many it is a near impossibility to balance them and, as of late, we’ve ended up with a lot of homogenized roles that have reduced the flavor of each class. It is time to start the dead pool and figure out just who is dead weight and who gets to stick around!
EverQuest II has been split into four main archetypes that are each intended to perform a particular role. Fighters take damage and priests heal damage. Scouts deal damage and for the most part so do mages. Everything is not as clear cut as that, but it certainly feels like we’re getting to that point. The old EQ1 system of setting “tiers of damage classes” is out the door. In our modern world everyone does a little of everything and to me that seems like a less than ideal situation. My Dead Pool is going to be based around going back to a more “EQ1″ type of class balance.
Fighters
The Guardian gets to remain as it, in theory, represents the pure damage mitigating tank. In practice that is no longer the case, but I’m going to take their traditional role away from them. Guardians will survive to be whacked in the face by raid and group mobs alike!
The Berserker also has a place in my heart. They are one of two “plate damage dealers.” I’d drop their ability to take damage to just slightly below that of a guardian and increase their ability to lay waste to their enemies.
Shadow Knights are out of hand and will probably continue to be. I see them as a very fine back up and off tank with a reasonable amount of damage generation. They represent my second plate damage dealer. I certainly wouldn’t leave them as their “tank everything while doing more dps than most classes” selves but what do I know!
The Paladin is one of my favorites and I think they’ve been given a fairly poor shake lately. They’re a little too much tank with virtually no damage (by comparison) and decent healing abilities. I’d drop that tank portion just a bit, up their damage some and fill out the buff and healing portion to make them more attractive to a raid. Just because you’re not main tank doesn’t mean you can’t shine!
Bruisers and Monks have never been the same since a Live Update tore them out of the role of damage dealing and into the tanking game. That is why the dead pool starts here! We have no use for two fighter classes that can only tank if they have the absolute best raid gear. Any other fighter is better suited to tanking and any other dps class will do more damage. They simply don’t offer anything unique at this time and haven’t for a while. I’d kill off the Bruiser class since the Monk is a traditional EQ1 role, add some serious damage and stop the farce of being a tank.
Priests
Templars are at a fairly strange place right now. They wear plate but that doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to mitigation. They use a shield but that also doesn’t make them very survivable. They’re on the cusp of my dead pool but since EQ1 was so focused on the cleric, they squeak into survival. The templar should continue to be a powerful buffer but needs to return to the role of the survivalist healer. Bucklers are too small for these guys and girls! Give them a kite shield, make that mitigation matter, and let them heal on when everyone else has long since died.
Inquisitors are also pretty close on my dead pool because they’ve fallen out of their role as the offensive cleric. They have some pretty cool tricks up their sleeve but homogenization has turned those tricks from unique to “a standard feature in all priests.” They certainly do damage but who doesn’t these days? Where is the differentiation? The Inquisitor could simply go away and turn a few of their cool toys over to the templar.
I’ve been seeing less and less distinction between the Mystic and Defiler lately. So much so that I’m really failing to see the “huge on buffs” vs “huge on debuffs” balance between the two. I’m also not sure it is necessary! The Dead Pool rages on! I’d combine the two into a single class.
The Fury suffers just like the Inquisitor. The “offensive” druid is no longer really so. Their neat tricks are being given away to others and that just makes the furies cry. If things keep up I can see them making the dead pool too!
Wardens have become the shadow knights of priests. They easily kick out tons of damage without falling off the heal parse. Lately they’ve made me and my fellow non-wardens feel inadequate. Somehow the defensive druid does more damage than the offensive one! I sense a merger coming.
Scouts
The assassin should represent the best in single target scout damage. They’ve been going back and forth between that and doing AE damage. For the most part I think they should remain about where they are.
Rangers are the only ranged damage that isn’t magical and are a big part of EQ. They too get to survive and should continue to provide entertainment for those of us who enjoy a lot of damage but also a lot of deaths!
Brigands and Swashbucklers are the scouts who make life easier. Their debuffs and damage really bring a lot to a raid. I don’t see the need to have two different flavors of the exact same thing, though. Merge them into one “rogue!”
Dirges and Troubadours are in the same boat as the rogues. They each offer something different to a specific group of classes. This can be both great and annoying. Fitting the right bard doesn’t really add any value and can make them less than appealing in certain raid situations. Let one eat the other and just have them switch roles depending on the group they’re in.
Mages
Wizards continue their EQ1 role of being solid magical damage from a distance. That seems to be the place to keep them and they haven’t made the list just yet!
Warlocks, on the other hand, are an off shoot of wizards. They’re like wizards but offer superior AE damage. I’m curious as to whether or not that needs its own class. Wouldn’t it be better to just stuff them back into the class that fathered them?
Illusionists and Coercers just don’t seem to distinguish themselves well enough from each other for my liking. They’re almost in the same situation as bards. I’d drop the new notion that coercers need to be “close to the action” and just put them back together into one enchanter class.
I’ve also never seen the need for two pet classes in EQ or EQ2. The concept that conjurers rely on choosing the right elemental for the job is cool. Necromancers just throw a lot of dead things at their target. This ends up being more of a flavor thing than a fundamental class difference. For the sake of the dead pool we’ll let them both live, for now.
Results
Guardian, Berserker, Shadow Knight, Paladin, Monk
Templar, Inquisitor, Shaman, Warden/Fury
Assassin, Ranger, Swashbuckler, Bard
Wizard, Warlock, Enchanter, Pet Class
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
It’s an interesting piece of theorising but actually implementing something like this would be a disaster.
Tobold has been talking today about endowment theory, the notion that you value something more when it’s yours. If you were to take someone’s beloved Bruiser and tell him, sorry your class is getting deleted you can probably kiss that player goodbye. Nothing you can offer is likely to work.
That’s because he values Shen Sheez the awesome butt-kicking ratonga from the mean streets that has a personal history much more than an offer of “you can reroll the character of your choice”.
To be blunt, doing this would be a NGE.
Oh I don’t disagree at all. This is an impossibility. I’m more making a point about class balance. When you’re so far out of whack that you can literally eliminate classes and not lose a role or “leader” that is pretty dangerous. Especially given that SOE is currently in a “radio silence” mode regarding it. The old tactic of “don’t speak when you can’t give any answers” just doesn’t work with such a sensitive subject.
Its definitely NGE, my take on it would be don’t worry, just each expansion make an attempt to balance up the classes. It will fail, but that’s not the point as
each expansion even if the game was previously perfect you would be changing it.
Over time it should be possible to get all the class roughly balanced, they don’t have to be totally different to be different then.
The only realistic way to merge them would be to make their differences choosable via talent points (with the title warden/fury awarded depending on
talent point choices), it would add in some easy of play, but take away long term playability.
This post reads to me like an argument for consolidating all twelve subclass pairings. You’ve voted to consolidate seven of twelve pairings outright, and expressed concern that several of the others are redundant but should be retained due to EQ1 nostalgia. The two Predators are the only pairing where there is a strong game mechanics argument for keeping both subclasses, because the two actually fill different roles (melee versus non-magic ranged).
That all said, I’m not sure how I’d feel about effectively converting EQ2′s subclass system into WoW’s talent system. (For example, in this model the “new” Sorcerer class would have a Sorcerer AA tree for general purpose enhancements, a Wizard tree for single target, and a Warlock tree for AOE.) This approach may or may not be easier to balance (WoW class balance is no cake walk either), but I feel that my EQ2 characters have much more in the way of story behind them than characters in any other game I play, precisely because the game forces me to pick a variation on a theme for each of them.