Class/Race Rant

[kaev]

Gratz, your mastery of nonsensical forum posting is second to none.

[Verityn]

The imbalance of the races was a fond feature for me and before Kunark came out I don't remember people making that big of a deal out of it. My first 50 was a Half Elf Druid and I never remember anyone pointing out that I had the equivalent of an entire bubble less mana than a Halfling. While I noticed that a gnome warrior had much less HP than an Ogre it still never stopped at least my gnome warrior friend from getting into Solb & lguk groups. He seemed more powerful at tanking than a monk or even a ranger so what's there to be complain about.

Now if you're going to talk about class balance, yes it was there with bells on, however, that was also a charming part of the game. From what I've gathered from having the opportunity to talk to Brad McQuaid it was clearly intentional to make the Necromancer for example capable of soloing what took 3 or more players. This same concept was even carried over to Vanguard to some degree and I've never seen it again. Well, does anyone even remember Horizons to warrant mentioning?

But yeah just like everyone says, play what you like, or you'll never enjoy an RPG. I think anyone who has played an Elder Scrolls game can vouch for this concept where you can spend hours optimizing a character just to realize that your character has no place in the reality of the game world.

[Tecmos Deception]

I remember Horizons. Had fun with it for a little while. Crafting was cool.

Optimizing an Elder Scrolls game just means "what one of the several different ridiculously broken things can I figure out to do with my character?" because the balance for those games is always so abysmal at release and they hardly do anything to fix it themselves cause they know the modders will just pick up the slack. I can't wait to see the ES MMO. It will be such a lulz fest.

[Versus]

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

The wiki entry for "Barbarian" is fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian

This is why I love you.

[Versus]

Doh, I didn't read the post just before yours trying to describe what a barbarian actually is. I still love you though.

[Reptak]

I keep seeing people say at 60, Human monk fist damage is better that Iksar, which is true (true pretty much all the way through). But no mention that Epic negates this and both get 9/16 fists. Which basically is all monks at 60. Human monks do not have a dps advantage over Iksar unless they are naked.

[Vicawin]

Use your imagination.

[greatdane]

The reason races were like this is that this is how they were on SojournMUD, the game that inspired Brad McQuaid to make Everquest. However, in that game, two additional factors made the races more balanced in a way.

First off, agility and dexterity meant a lot more than they do in EQ. The game was based heavily on the AD&D2nd ruleset (except it split the original dex stat into dex and agi, and changed the scale of some numbers a little to make it work better with a DIKU codebase) so agi made a huge difference in armor class. There were certain breakpoints and each race had an agi cap that determined their maximum possible avoidance AC. In EQ, agi makes almost no difference and can be completely ignored as long as you don't go below the 75 threshold.

Basically, AC from armor had a range of 200, from 100 (worst) to -100 (best). The agi modifier then came on top independently of worn armor, ensuring that the race's agi mattered even if you had max armor from items. As far as I remember, the highest bonus was grey elf with -55, while some races like ogre actually had a penalty. The difference from least to most agile was something like 75 armor. Considering that the base scale spanned 200 points, 75 was a huge difference. The agile races had comparatively less strength and con, so an ogre might have like 30-40% more hit points than an elf and hit twice as hard. Dex affected several things, including chance for extra attacks, making it a very important stat as well.

Secondly, the setting was a lot more realistic (within the premises of the game, at least - it was still AD&D in Forgotten Realms) so if you chose to play an evil race, it was a lot harder. In the case of some races, it was almost impossible to play unless you already had max-level characters with endgame gear (nothing was no-drop) so that you could make a supertwink. Still, the evil races had serious problems such as being actually blind in daylight, like literally unable to see, and living in a part of the world that was as hospitable as Plane of Fear or something. You couldn't just fuck off to a nicer part of the world at level 10 and get a bind in a convenient spot. If you were a dark elf, you lived in the fucking underdark and only came to the carebear surface during raids. This meant it was okay for evil races to be statistically superior in many ways, and it was balanced like that. Evil was like hardmode and you had basically separate playerbases because you couldn't group across good and evil.

Everquest lost sight of this distinction and kept some parts of the Sojourn model without implementing most of the balancing factors. This is why you see things like ogres having so much better stats for tanking because they forgot to make agility matter, and why the races with high int are so superior as spellcasters because the stamina formula result in such a small difference in hit points. On Sojourn, a human enchanter would have a good 20% more hit points than a dark elf. If you played an invoker (wizard), whose job was mostly to unload a full memorization pool worth of nukes and then get out of harm's way, it was better to be a race with high int (memorize spells back faster) while an enchanter or elementalist (magician) might want to be a sturdier race because they had to be in the danger zone the whole fight in order to reactively stoneskin the tank, command their pet and such. Sojourn didn't have mana, it had memorization like D&D, so a class that delivered a bunch of damage and then disengaged to re-memorize was better off with high int and low hp while a class that had to stay in the fight as support didn't need that high int but had to have more hp.

On Sojourn, this race system served as an early precursor to "builds" in this way. You could make an avoidance tank or a meatshield tank, and they functioned in entirely different ways. Sure, a human warrior would suck and nobody played that, but human was the only race that could be paladins and anti-paladins (basically shadowknights). There weren't talent points or anything like that, but your race/class combination determined what role you'd fill. Bashing was an important form of crowd control and you couldn't bash or be bashed by anything more than two size categories away from you, so very small or very big tanks were good for not being bashable by most mobs while more average-sized fighters served as bashers themselves. A shrunk gnome tank couldn't be bashed by an earth elemental, which was important for tanking them -- but he couldn't bash them either and someone had to do that, so a barbarian might be just the right size for that particular kind of mob. Some mobs couldn't be bashed at all and had to be charged instead by a mounted fighter, i.e a human paladin or anti-paladin. Some mobs hit really hard so you'd want an elf avoidance tank, others had unavoidable breath attacks so you'd want an ogre meatshield.

Everquest took half of that system and ignored the other half, leaving some obvious gaps that now make every class have one or two obviously optimal races. I actually wonder how well the developers understood this -- I don't remember Brad McQuaid as a player from Sojourn so I can't say whether he was a noob or what, but EQ's race system suggests he at least didn't understand that part of it.


Fun fact: SojournMUD invented the concepts of PvE raiding, tanking, advanced itemization, and all the other core elements of MMORPGs. Considering the fact that MUDs are 100% text-based games that peaked in the early and mid-90s, that's pretty impressive. SojournMUD is still alive and currently called TorilMUD, but I don't think it's very active anymore and it's just as dependent on a playerbase as Everquest is. Last time I checked was in like 2008 and the playerbase was down to under 50 even then. It had hundreds of players online back in the day and the game was played in exactly the same way as you play Everquest, right down to having almost all the same classes and races, plus a lot of similar zones. Trolls live in a swamp while their neighbouring ogre cousins live in some kind of stone age-like village. Humans have their main city of Waterdeep, after which Freeport is directly modeled, and then the secondary city of Baldur's Gate in the other end of the world. Barbarians live in the frozen peaks in the north and so on. The parrallels are strikingly obvious. The main difference is the Underdark where most of the evil races live, except for ogres and trolls, though they tend to go there because they can't go very far on the surface.

[Tecmos Deception]

Only read your post until I got to the point where a negative number for armor was better, and then I remembered THAC0 and how totally retarded it was.

Who in their right mind would develop a system where you have to do that much shit bassackwards?

[greatdane]

It's not the most elegant system, but I guess everything starts out primitive before it gets refined. Keep in mind that it was made for a dice system where it made a bit more sense. You have a d20 and your THAC0 score, so by default you need to roll your THAC0 or higher to hit. Then modify this number based on the target's AC. Think of AC's numerical value not as a measurement of 'how tough is my armor' but instead 'how does my armor affect an attack.' If your AC is -5, everyone gets -5 to their attack roll against you. It makes a little more sense that way.