Quote:
Originally Posted by falkun
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Since EQ was heavily influenced by the AD&D ruleset, I am making the assumption that the reason rangers were deemed to be a chain-mail class was because of ties to this AD&D restriction. Or it may be that the roots of the ranger class are more rogue/druid based and since rogues cannot wear armor heavier than chain that the restriction was also maintained for rangers.
Also, I don't know if EQ had the mechanics to be able to code "if armor > chain, then ability_to_cast = off", so they just made the broad designation that they could not wear armor above chain.
Obviously this is all speculation and you are free to agree or disagree as you see fit.
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Oh, I understand what you're saying, but then shadowknights are a hybrid of a plate/cloth class, and therefore shouldn't be wearing plate.
I think it just has more to do with class balancing... i.e. if you give rangers plate, spells, double attack, dual wield, AND archery... why would people want to play a warrior or knight class? Instead, they gimped our mitigation/avoidance and made us a chain class, which also fit the AD&D version of what a ranger was. And then to continue the class balancing exercise -- if rangers out-DPSed rogues, what would be the compelling reason to play a rogue? If rangers did awesome ranged damage, where's the risk in that... make sure melee is still their primary form of DPS. Etc. All the way down to... lets just make a ranger a jack-of-all trades -- without the foresight of "wow, rangers can't really do anything well even though they're hybrids... are they really deserving of this XP penalty?" until Velious, when the class-based penalties were finally lifted. Even during Luclin, when the devs decided to throw rangers a bone and make archery a primary form of DPS through AAs and itemization, the bitching from the other classes was too great, and our ranged attack abilities took a nerf (so I heard... this was actually after I stopped playing around the time of GoD) because it was too overpowered (i.e. high damage outside of AE range at virtually no risk).
Hybrids were originally imagined to be much more capable than the pure classes, and thus deserving of the 40% XP penalty... but in practice, that gap in ability never quite panned out (except for knight classes in terms of holding aggro, but I would say that was more of an issue with the warrior class NOT having good aggro tools... as evidenced by taunt fixes). In my opinion, the classes that could solo effectively should have received the 40% XP penalty... but I don't think the designers had a firm grasp on which classes could solo effectively until everyone started playing the game. It almost seems like they thought all the hybrids would be able to solo effectively.
But this is all an exercise in speculation, I suppose. Overall, I tend to agree with the rogue/druid hybrid theory.