Sam I am breaking my self-imposed hiatus from this board just to respond to you here.
"Balance versus classic"? Really?
I had written a LONG post articulating the differences of the two resist systems in that Trakanon thread, responding to Rogean. I ended up just nuking it but I'll give you the short form here.
This custom resist system is not even close to being better balanced than live was.
On live: monks and rogues were underpowered pre-epic/tstaff, and middle-of-the-pack once 60 and fully geared. Druids were one of the best (along with SK). I played all three classes on Tallon Zek, so I would know.
Here: Druids are stronger. They can land their retarded DD-root spells here. SKs are also stronger. Paladins, too. Yep... three of the best pvp classes on live were effectively buffed under this custom system. Monks and rogues? They're worse. The weaker classes were effectively nerfed. Classes like bards and enchanters? Their balance is even more polarized and rock-paper-scissors now. They can land things they couldn't before (WTYH, bard mez, etc), but can be rooted and stunned now. It's a mess. All it really does is introduce cheap unavoidable deaths if you happen to be on the wrong side of the random number generator.
I cannot emphasize how good it was for the gameplay to remove CC from the equation. In classic you HAD to be good at sticking to people with a melee to get kills. As a caster, you learned all the jukes and tricks with terrain and kept buffs up like levitate. To me this was much preferred over WoW-EQ where the pvp strategy is dumbed down to spamming CC on one guy. I don't want to play that. I used to drop in on entire raids on my live monk -- here I wouldn't even chance a 1v4 situation because there's a pretty good chance I'd get rooted and zerged if they're spamming a 1.5 second spell with a 10-15% chance to land.
If I was balancing a resist system I would use classic as the baseline + buff enchanter/cleric nukes. That's all that was ever needed.
I get what Null was trying to do in theory by "fixing" unused spell lines, but the fact is certain spell lines have no place in pvp. There was a reason Verant flat-out disabled fear + charm, and made any forms of CC nearly impossible to land unless the target was heavily debuffed. Since I doubt any of the custom designs for eqemu servers are being tested much internally, that 80/20 poll against it after 10 months of player testing is all the feedback necessary. I don't know if he still checks these forums, though. I sure wouldn't hold it against him for not doing so.
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