someone has to say it, this is getting out of hand...
 

Why the hell are there 5 plate wearing classes? Bards should not wear plate. Think about the game balance. You have 5 plate, 4 cloth, 3 chain, and 2 leather armor classes. How does that make any sense? If you moved Bard to leather, which is 100% logical from any sort of realistic fantasy view, you would have 4,4,3,3. See the balance? The symmetry? From lowest to highest AC, 4,3,3,4. See? So how did these geniuses who designed this game fuck up so badly? Explain.

What kind of dancing singer wears hundreds of pounds of plate, but runs at Usain Bolt speed? Every other game has bards wearing light armor. You can't play musical instruments with plate gauntlets on. WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS?

god damn you people make me sick...

I have to admit, this has bugged me as well

Keep christ in Christmas is what i was told.

They generated more aggro then tanks in classic thats why they gave it to them

And Halflings (with Sneak/Hide) get a 5% XP bonus, while Humans (clearly the most inferior race) get nothing. And Barbarians can master being sneaky (ie. being Rogues) but Iksar can't? And Enchanters get Clarity when clearly it would have made much more sense for Wizards to get it. Same for Shamans getting Torpor instead of Druids. And ...

There's lots about classic EQ that doesn't make sense. The game succeeded (wildly) in spite of its flaws ... but even so I'd love to someday see someone make a "Violet" server that's sort of like Green, but with all that sort of stuff corrected.

These are all good points.

Man, Wizards really should've had Clarity...that would've fixed them. Maybe even a really powerful self-only Clarity too.

Agreed on those, but those are minor issues. I'm talking big picture game design here. What I am talking about is literally 1 layer of abstraction away from "Lets have 12 tank classes, 1 priest class, and 1 dps class reeeeeeeeee". They went far enough into game balance to realize they needed a nice spread of class archetypes, so not sure how they got the armor types for those classes so wrong. Put me in the meeting where dude says "GIVE BARDS PLATE" and everybody nods.

And yes, the complete broken OPness of Enchanters is disturbing. Clarity and int/wis buffs should have went to wizards. "Hey guys, lets give all the cool shit to this class! What about wizards? Oh just give them some nukes and maybe a root."

3^(3) = 27; 3^(2) = 9; 3^(1) = 3;
27^(1/3) = 3; 9^(1/2) = 3; 3^(1/1) = 3;
27/3 = 9; 9/3 = 3; 3/3 = 1

27 is the answer you were lookin' for. The perfect cube. It's out of hand we don't have 27 class types with armor subsets containing 3 or 9 elements.