Quote:
Originally Posted by RevengeofGio
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
I think the game would fail (sorry).
Too many classes are simply easy mechanically in the origial EQ. You'd have to update the lacking classes, remove penalities that don't make sense and buff certain classes.
Sorry anyone that would leave ranger as is and call it good game design is probably pretty high on the idiot meter.
"Lets make a class that really doesn't have a role!" .. Mediocre at a bunch of things and good at none.
|
The druid was mediocre in groups. They had a lot of dots and dots don't work well in groups. Their heal wasn't on the level of a cleric. So were necromancers. They also had a lot of dots. But both these classes were really good at soloing. Rangers, by comparison, were (far) better than warriors at soloing, and while ok in groups, their dps and tanking ability falls short of the classes that focus on those things.
I still feel to this day that there was something in the code that genuinely made rangers overpowered. That's why they added the exp penalty. Unfortunately, it's missed on the vast majority of us. My guess is it was an argument made on loose logic and in the long run failed. Maybe, for example, they thought root or snare was too powerful. However, it turned out that dps and tanking were more important for the ranger in a group and the ranger wasn't good enough at those things. Clearly, the classes that focused on something were more popular and made it to the higher levels at a greater rate.
Maybe they did make a bad build, kind of like how players do that in skill-based games.
Go here to see how the class popularity fared on project 1999:
http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...7&postcount=48
You can see the paladins and shadowknights had worse (lasting) popularity than rangers. In fact, rangers did better than druids at translating popularity in -all- previous level tiers to max level.
Of course, the popularity of rangers, like paladins and shadowknights, never exceeded about 9% of the class population share, and at max level, never exceeded 2%. (note: on this particular chart)
Btw, I played a ranger starting in Mar 99. I didn't even know back then that they had an exp penalty. I liked to be able to do lots of different things, whether on my own or in a group. Another reason I liked them was their connection to the forest and their ability to wield weapons effectively - I'm not a pure caster. I later created another ranger in 2001 (i think) on a different server and played him for several years after.