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]

Originally Posted by Gilder [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

[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]

Originally Posted by Ele [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The full explanation can be found in the EQ Producer's Letter

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]

Originally Posted by bktroost [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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.