Experience penalties aren't that big of a deal
 

I see a lot of people worrying about the exp penalties when deciding on a class and I wanted to point out that only 5 out of the 14 classes won't have a class exp penalty on green. One of them is the Shaman and they still can't avoid the racial exp penalties. So what you're left with are druids, clerics, rogues and warriors who aren't a large race. Basically healers and classes that aren't going to be that amazing until Kunark comes out in a year.

Some of the funnest classes and races have the harshest experience penalties. But I believe that is by design! This game is incredible!...Well, it was incredible!

Wait, what?

The barbarians, trolls and ogres have racial exp penalties.

I mean barb -5% thats not really noticeable

I think there's two issues with the XP penalty: rational and social. You can argue all you want about the practical/rational/actual effects of having an XP penalty ... but I'll leave that discussion to others.

I just want to point out that there's the equally (more?) important social aspect. Certain class/race combos are going to be perceived as eating up a ton of group XP and not giving an equivalent value.

Regardless of the truth of that (eg. the fact that class A/race A actually has the same or similar penalty to widely reviled class B/race B), the very perception about certain classes/races by the player base is going to have a real impact on what it's like to play those classes/races.

Meta roleplay

Classic af

That is not something I'm used to thinking about. In the past 10 years I've only played on TLP servers and soloed on P1999. Even on live during classic era I remember playing for a quite a while where no I knew was aware of the class penalties. All the way to level 50 right after Kunark came out I had no idea that my bard had a 40% exp penalty. People seemed to not hesitate to invite an Ogre SK.

I hope that people can try to let go of some of their min/maxing inclinations by remembering that we have about a year until Kunark comes out. Even with Kunark there are a lot of reasons to create another character so for a quite some time for many people it's going to be about the journey and much less about the end game.

A group with 2 rangers 2 pallies and 2 sks is actually negative exp. Similar to dieing without rez

Jk, but I do remember it's being noticeable and when I was trying to speed run my shaman to 60 I didn't appreciate when hybrids got invited to group. #100% class bias

Players who think about the experience penalty when in a group with a hybrid have lost the true meaning of EverQuest!