EQ theory explanation?
 

Did Brad ever explain why certain things were the way they were in classic?

Just a couple of examples below but we all know there are a lot more.

-Casters are simply more powerful than melee, was it a willful imbalance? Or accidental?
-regen rates are virtually the same for casters as they are melee?
-wizards are kind of shitty
-certain zones are just dog shit. Beholders maze is just one example.

Personally I like the imbalances of the early game. For a brief moment, I thought anyone that would choose a race/combo other than iksar/necro or ogre/warrior was playing the game wrong. But the charm is choosing what you like rather than what’s the “best”. Same with leveling zones. Sometimes it’s just fun to go to a new place and get bad experience/loot.

Nobody ever talks about it but casters have an exp penalty.

Expand on that

Everquest was heavily inspired by DnD, and the same discrepancies existed between the classes in that system.

In the earlier levels, DnD melee classes are much better than casters. They do good consistent damage, and low level caster spells kind of suck. But by the endgame, casters are simply way better due to getting really powerful spells later on.

Same thing in Everquest. First 30 levels or so a Warrior can just chew through enemies if they are twinked. But by level 60 a naked Necromancer is going to run circles around a raid geared Warrior when looking at how well the two classes can solo.

Racial choice was also heavily influenced by the faction system in original Everuqest. The idea is pretty clear: Good races are weaker individually, but they have more class choices and more cities to find each other. So they band together to make up for individual disadvantages. Evil races naturally distrust each other, so they are more likely to go solo. This means they need to be naturally stronger to compensate.

The problem is that they basically started abandoning the complex factions in Kunark. By Velious, your race/relgion basically didn't matter at all. So you end up with races that are simply better than others, because the original counter-balance of good races coming together via faction abd location was abandoned.

10% penalty for being high INT in a robe.

Thanks for the explanation. I suppose the only think I would disagree with is that everything remaining the same, I don’t even think a low level warrior/rogue beats a Druid, shaman, mage, cleric, necro.

Here, you can have this warrior that can’t solo a blue con mob and even if he could it will take you 30 minutes to regen all of your health, but you’ll have no exp penalty.

Or you can have this clothie that has this 10% exp penalty but can kill 5x the mobs (probably more) in the same amount of time and with way less risk.

Truth is, every class in the game depends on the robed ones, just like the hobbits, dvarves, humans and elves depended on Gandalf.

Melee characters (when twinked) can power through low level content quite well, because they don't need to meditate back mana. My Monk from 1-30 with a fungi could just about non-stop auto attack mobs to death for the most part without sitting, unless I got really greedy and pulled too many. My twinked Warrior in a Ceremonial Iksar Chestplate had a similar experience from 1-24.

But I do agree with you that Everquest casters are stronger in the low levels than their DnD counterparts. DnD casters were basically useless for the first few levels lol.

Yep. DnD. Casters are Gandalf. Melee r meant to team up. Casters are too butt we developed the enchanter/
shm meta as emergent play.

I'll be 10000% with you. Casters have it a bit too easy on p99. Especially enchanters. Everyone grouped for safety. Especially against DC's and lag.

It was all talked about on usenet or the various EQ-related boards, but good luck finding all the discussion today. Verant's right arm didn't always know what its left was doing, so sometimes you got completely different answers from one developer to the next.

The idea with casters was they were stronger as long as they had mana, but they paid for it with lengthy downtime and blind spellbook meditating. It didn't work out all that well in practice because often enough the melee had to sit around waiting on casters anyway, and melee gear was so weak that melee players couldn't really take much advantage.

Some zones were plain unfinished, and a few weren't implemented at all. Same issue most of these types of games have. In EQ, more often than not the unfinished parts tended to stay unfinished. Development preferred to focus on the never ending expansion rush or money was diverted into other projects.

989/Verant was repeatedly told Wizards weren't great, but they doubled down. It was supposed to have the highest burst damage of any class--which it does. Just VI apparently thought burst was way more important than the players did. Wizards did provide a group protection against kill-stealing, so there was that, and with most experience groups waiting around for spawns between cycles, without P99-style nonstop fighting, they didn't seem as bad as they do on here.