Sorry for the long gap between posts school has had me very busy. As the title suggest this is not the next game world post, but a post in the way of me showing what I feel MMO's are lacking as they continue to be pumped out. This post is not bias in any way I have played a ton of MMORPGs and understand that classes do need to have similarities to keep balance, but where is the line for too similar?
The biggest challenge I have had as far as class design and concepts is the uniqueness of each class. Every time I seem to be happy with a class a MMO comes out that really comes close to one of my classes designs and I then either scrap the class or modify it. Since you will be playing a single class you like for most of the game there really needs to be uniqueness between the classes so you don't feel you are just playing a clone of another class. My biggest gripe with this seems to be World of Warcraft, WoW is a great game and I love it but sometimes other classes seem to just blend in with others. The biggest comparison I make is mage and warlock. Both are spell casters and they do differ in their own right (warlock gets powerful dots, debuffs, and pets while mage relies more on just raw damage spells.) but when it comes to game play each class just sits back and slings spells at the target.
That is something I really want to avoid is classes that may differ in their spell/ability access, but when it comes to game play differ very little. So with my caster classes I have been trying to give them each different play styles, one that can inflict raw damage but also has utility abilities to add on how they position them selves and another that uses spells that my alter the foe in ways that they can really change the pace of battle and control fights. In a nut shell they both can deal damage but have to utilize different aspects of their class to do this instead of class A, and B just standing back and spamming a spell waiting for a proct. I really want spell casters to be able to show their uniqueness in combat and in doing so making them more involved with battles rather than just being a casters that just have either dots, or more raw damage spells. Classes need to be fun since they are what a player will be spending all their time learning and perfecting. The same can be said about tanking but I don't want this post to drag on for ever so in a later post I will touch on the other aspects of game play (tanking/healing/melee damage dealing). Thanks for reading and thank you for the feedback.
