So... why did hybrids get penalties in the first place?

[Gilder]

I was too young to know the true game mechanics back in 99. (Hell, I still don't know even 10% of the game, but that's another thread)

Why exactly did they penalize hybrids in the first place?

Did the exp penalty actually *benefit* anyone?

Was it removed as a result of the players efforts? Or did the Devs just come to their senses?

Genuinely curious, as I play a Troll SK and I've greatly noticed the before and after effects.

[Champion_Standing]

EQ devs were horribly afraid of hybrids being OP and the exp penalty is a DnD thing for multi-class characters.

I think they just finally realized that they had penalized hybrids to the point of making them undesirable.

[Monty405]

Hybrids didnt turn out as strong as they assumed they may have been.

They did keep the race penalties cause some races do have certain benefits (ogre no frontal stun, troll / iksar regen)

[Issar]

It made sense to a degree and it was a model that was followed from tabletop rpgs. The idea was that hybrids had a significant advantage over classes like warriors and rogues, due to their abilities to cast and melee/tank. Because of this, they suffered an exp penalty. If a warrior and an SK were to both go from 1 to 50, without twink gear and in the vanilla era, the SK would crush the warrior if there was no penalty. SK's would be more sought after in groups and could solo more effectively. Again, this isn't taking into account fungi twinks and such. Thats my understanding of it any way.

[Ele]

I was too young to know the true game mechanics back in 99. (Hell, I still don't know even 10% of the game, but that's another thread)

Why exactly did they penalize hybrids in the first place?

Did the exp penalty actually *benefit* anyone?

Was it removed as a result of the players efforts? Or did the Devs just come to their senses?

Genuinely curious, as I play a Troll SK and I've greatly noticed the before and after effects.

As others have already stated it was a nod to D&D multi-classing, which allows for more powerful characters versus a pure class. However, the translation did not really work in EQ due to grinding xp, mudflation between expansions, disciplines, and itemization.

Beneficiaries of class exp penalties? The people without them. Although it was known at the time that some classes had penalties, your casual player did not know or care enough about them to ostracize the hybrid classes. Here, pretty much everyone knew about the penalty coming into the server and a lot of people actively sought to exclude those classes from groups (even though it isn't that big of a deal, if you have a full group and the person knows how to play their class).

Removal of the exp penalty was a combination of player complaints and devs realizing that it did not pan out as they intended.


The full explanation can be found in the EQ Producer's Letter (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/011401_EQ_Producers_letter.html)

[maestrom]

It's a holdover from Dungeons and Dragons and other table-top RPGs.

In these games, hybrid classes like Ranger, Paladin, fighter-Thief, and others, were often at each level nearly as powerful as either class that made up their class.

For example, A ranger was nearly always as powerful in melee as a fighter of the same level (similar hit dice and THAC0), but rangers could also cast druid spells. In this way, a level 4 ranger and a level 4 warrior were not equally strong.

Since D&D was typically played in static groups, with each character receiving roughly the same amount of experience per play session, forcing a hybrid class to get more experience in order to level was a way of balancing the power of a group.

Thus, after 3-4 sessions, your fighter might be level 4-5, but your ranger would only be level 3.

This worked in D&D because the vast majority of campaigns never had any character past level 10 or so. Achieving max level was less important in D&D because the DM could easily tailor encounters to the abilities of the party.

This doesn't work in Everquest for many reasons.

First of all, hybrids are not significantly more powerful than each of their parent classes at each level. They typically don't even fill the same roles as their parent classes. Shadow knights are not mana batteries, Paladins are not healers, Rangers are not buffers or tanks, Bards are worthless in physical combat compared to any other melee class.

Second, there is a level cap, and a substantial number of players actually reach it. Therefore the ability of players of parent classes to make up for any power deficit (that doesn't exist, see point 1) by simply getting another level or two, is not available.

Third, and possibly the biggest problem, was that no one really knew how much experience each person had. There was a recommendation early on from the EQ dev team that players group with other players who had similar amounts of raw experience, rather than looking at the level of the player. They wanted a level 30 cleric to be grouped with a level 24 or so paladin. The problem is, a level 30 warrior and a level 30 cleric can handle MUCH more powerful encounters than the 30/24 makeup, and in both situations the cleric would receive the same experience per kill. Since players preferred to group wither other players around their own character level rather than experience level, this revealed the error in the experience accrual system that came to be known as the "hyrbid experience penalty" where inviting a hybrid or, god forbid, two to your group would effectively halt experience when compared to a similar non-hybrid group.

In short. The original EQ developers used D&D as a template and blindly adopted many of D&D's systems without actually thinking deeply about how EQ would actually be played. Looking back, it was stupid and obvious that it wouldn't work the way they wanted it to. But you have to remember that EQ didn't have anything else to work off of, it was the first MMO of its kind. The only other big one at the time was Ultima Online, but that was a skills-based system rather than an experience based system.

[MycahDavith]

To Hit Amour Class Zero was one of the most amazing systems in it's time.

[tristantio]

Baldur's Gate (and 2) did it right.

[bktroost]

The full explanation can be found in the EQ Producer's Letter (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/011401_EQ_Producers_letter.html)

I know you are the classic link master, Mr Allakhazam himself, but you went back and sourced the producer's letter on Velious?

I lol'd at the thought of you as a child today being asked to source your documents and just seeing a string of well researched url's at the end of your paper--nearly as long as the paper itself.

[Ele]

I know you are the classic link master, Mr Allakhazam himself, but you went back and sourced the producer's letter on Velious?

I lol'd at the thought of you as a child today being asked to source your documents and just seeing a string of well researched url's at the end of your paper--nearly as long as the paper itself.

No wiki citations here. :D

It is fun parsing back through old Wayback archives on Graffe's or Druid's Grove finding interesting responses from original devs to player questions that got posted to Harpy's Head Tavern, when the links still work. Sometimes you have to go forward in time on Archive.org to find working links to different sections of the sites and work your way back in time after going up or down a level in the site tree.

It is truly a shame Archive.org didn't capture more of Harpy's Head Tavern and that The Safehouse used robots.txt (along with a number of other popular class forums) . We lost a lot of important information from that.

[Champion_Standing]

Wait did we get those ZEM and group boosts yet or what?

[nhdjoseywales]

As others have already stated it was a nod to D&D multi-classing, which allows for more powerful characters versus a pure class. However, the translation did not really work in EQ due to grinding xp, mudflation between expansions, disciplines, and itemization.

Beneficiaries of class exp penalties? The people without them. Although it was known at the time that some classes had penalties, your casual player did not know or care enough about them to ostracize the hybrid classes. Here, pretty much everyone knew about the penalty coming into the server and a lot of people actively sought to exclude those classes from groups (even though it isn't that big of a deal, if you have a full group and the person knows how to play their class).

Removal of the exp penalty was a combination of player complaints and devs realizing that it did not pan out as they intended.


The full explanation can be found in the EQ Producer's Letter (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/011401_EQ_Producers_letter.html)

The ZEM modifier changes discussed there, are those the ZEM's we already have or will some zones be getting a bump up?

[hillgiantchamp]

I didn't read any other posts so i don't know if this was mentioned but I notice in eq pvp hybrids have a lot of benefits and maybe they had this in mind when thinking they where OP. I know sks make great pvp with ht, Paladins with flash of light and LOH is huge in pvp, Rangers being able to track other players snare etc huge in pvp etc etc

[Gilder]

Wow, I had no clue it went all the way back to classic table top stuff.

Thanks for the answers everyone. I always thought it was sort of a "fluke" decision that got corrected. Never realized so much went into it.

Thanks for sharing.

[Brontus]

The full explanation can be found in the EQ Producer's Letter (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/011401_EQ_Producers_letter.html)

Thanks for sharing that link :)

[AxerJ]

I always thought it made sense lore-wise. Seems like hybrids would be more difficult to train as. Especially made sense with race penalties for Ogres and Trolls, as they're just less intelligent and would learn more slowly. I liked the idea of an Ogre or Troll SK being a very rare thing to see because of the exp penalty - so if you ever saw one, you'd be like, "damn" for a sec and then continue on to Kelethin to have fun levitating. And it'd make sense that there wouldn't be very many accomplished Trolls or Ogres in game anyway, especially SKs. Just always thought it'd take more dedication from a real character to master the Paladin, SK, or Ranger classes. And it makes the more penalized combos more impressive to see as high level chars.

It's late, sorry for the rambling.

[Surin]

That is probably the idea the original devs had, too, Axer. Unfortunately, what they implemented was not an "impressive" class that warranted the penalty. In old table top, where you had level penalties based on some classes/races, you had it because those choices offered serious boosts. It makes sense they removed them in Velious, although it'd have been prudent for them to recognize the issue sooner.

[Kutsumo]

The thought of a more powerful class that levels more slowly works great when you have no level cap and the game ends at some point. If EQ went in "campaigns" or "seasons" where you start fresh (or maybe a reincarnated version of your previous character) and have effectively no level cap before reaching the end, it might have worked great.

[stormlord]

I was too young to know the true game mechanics back in 99. (Hell, I still don't know even 10% of the game, but that's another thread)

Why exactly did they penalize hybrids in the first place?

Did the exp penalty actually *benefit* anyone?

Was it removed as a result of the players efforts? Or did the Devs just come to their senses?

Genuinely curious, as I play a Troll SK and I've greatly noticed the before and after effects.
On live, I played a ranger in 1999 and kept playing them all through the years. (I also played hybrids here when the penalties were active. I didn't care, contrary to a lot of people who seem to.) But back in the early times, nobody knew much about the game. I didn't even know I had a penalty when I was playing in 1999. You know, back then, most of the joy came from it being so spectacular and new. We didn't hyper examine it, nor was all of this on the internet yet.

BUT I think the reason the hybrid penalty failed is primarily rooted in how players select for group members and also the incorrect work of developers. Explaining this fully is not possible in this single post, but I can try.

Fundamentally, in ideal terms, all classes are balanced around the group-centered game, so that they're dependent on each other and mutually equal. As a class designer, if you take a point from one skill, you must put it elsewhere in a skill or skills, resulting in an equal value. For example, I might take 1 point from tanking and put half of it in dps and the other half in healing. How much I put in dps and healing is dependent on how much value those have compared to tanking. Everything has value and this is how you balance the classes to ensure they're mutually equal and dependent on each other.

In all practical terms, they failed somewhere in making the classes mutually equal and dependent on each other. The addition of experience modifiers wasn't necessary, but the fact it was there from the very beginning for different races and classes shows it was considered a viable means to balance the classes around a center point. Not only do I think this was probably a mistake (mostly due to how different experience modifiers cause players to level at different rates and not be able to group with each other eventually), but I also think they misjudged the value of abilities or traits or skills the classes or races had. This means their capacity to balance around a center, regardless of the method--like exp modifiers, would be in error.

Their failure meant that when groups came together they would discourage hybrids from joining and much preferred specialists like rogues, warriors and clerics. Rangers couldn't tank as well as a warrior or dps like a rogue or tank/dps as well as a monk. Rangers traded raw tanking/dpsing for utility spells like root and snare and sow and minor heals. Theoretically, those things had mutually equal value, but ultimately, this shown to be untrue. Groups valued raw tanking/dpsing/healing/cc/etc over utility. Utillity for rangers covered a broad range from healing to dps to cc and buffs, but since they were utility they tended to be weaker versions. In a group, weaker didn't float. The designers mistakenly attached too much value to it.

I do think as the years went by they did make rangers more specialized dps. I get the distinct impression we started out much more blurred, tanking and dpsing and just doing all sorts of things not very well. (This could be a mistaken impression, since the early levels are blurred for nearly all of the classes, until about level 20.) Yet modern EQ classes seem more homogenized. This may be an attempt to make it simpler and easier to balance, but for me it ruins it. I loved hybrids.

(I played my ranger up until 85 and 1000's of aa. A pally was my highest alt.)

[stormlord]

Regarding Rangers... Want to add utility wasn't always valueless. There were a couple places where snaring was useful, for example. Only trouble was you were expect to snare every mob. Failure was automatic kick.

It didn't even come close to making up for the shortfall, but it was something.

Oh and another thing. A lot of chose Ranger because....... Strider/Aragorn. Wielding two blades and letting loose arrows with your badass bow whilst singing to your nature God? And being able to solo when the mood struck? THAT was uber.

Being able to solo more freely WAS a big part of the choice, although it's not why -I- started with one in 1999. Rather, it was idealistic. I wanted to play a righteous class which was nature-based. And one that had a dick. Druids were dickless. And by that I don't mean to disparage. I mean swords. I mean bows. I mean directly breaking the skull of your enemy. I didn't get it from pure casters. Too removed. Again, they felt dickless to me. (I'm not saying Gandalf was dickless, am I? Because I sure as hell am not. Gandalf got a bigger dick than anyone.) But somehow I need a sword or an instrument of battle.

[Cecily]

Regarding Rangers... Want to add utility wasn't always valueless. There were a couple places where snaring was useful, for example. Only trouble was you were expect to snare every mob. Failure was automatic kick.

It didn't even come close to making up for the shortfall, but it was something.

Doesn't help that P99's flee mechanics aren't right, I'm almost positive. You'd have more use for a snare class if mobs ran properly.