What classes from all other MMOs would you bring back into a new Game?

I think a lot of the fondness people remember for Bards stems from A) a great bard was playing 400x harder than any other bard and enjoyed knowing that sheer mechanical repetition was blocking out anyone from stealing his glory, and B) how easily they could break game mechanics.

No mention of GW1 classes ? The lack of loot progression let them create some pretty interesting skills, since traiditional MMOs always need most of them to scale with gear.

Dervish is probably my favorite, imagine an africa-inspired monk with scythe. Some buffs and attacks that get more powerful by removing them and everything does AoE damage.
Mesmer was pretty faithfully recreated in GW2, but the original is a bit more crazy and thanks to bigger groups you could go full utility, leaving mobs/players unable to do anything.
Ritualist was THE PvE class, since the static spirits did truckload of damage with Painful Bond turning it into AoE, meaning all mobs you stacked up blew up.
Necromancer - either you end up cursing everybody ala mesmer, or you animate tons of little critters, turn them into ticking bombs and let them go to town. Easy energy management thanks to soul reaping.

Kirun_sl said:

Agreed.

Seriously, all of the bards I knew who were legitimatelygoodat their class, hated it. The jokes about carpal tunnel are not overblown. The people who liked grouping with well-played bards, had one as an alt, or thought switching between Anthem de Arms and Cassindra's every now then, while tossing out an occasional boastful bellow or Kelin's? Sure, they think bards were the greatest thing ever.

The reality is that a well-played bard took probably more attention, focus, awareness, and APM than any other class in the game and the benefits they offered in return for that? Marginally better than their counterparts. In some cases, even worse. The bard effort required vs. reward merited was one of the worst ratios in the game.

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I knew a couple of bards that were top notch that loved their class like Charlie Sheen loves hookers.

The point is not to require any higher APM than any other class, but mixing a few (not their entire fucking rotation) short duration buffs/debuffs in that are powerful, and capped somehow in how many they can have active at once into a class could provide the same "feel" that EQ bards had (a tool for every situation) without forcing carpal tunnel any more than a WoW rogue does.

Say they have 15 buffs, 8 debuffs, but can only have 3 buffs and 2 debuffs up at any given time, each with a 60-90 second duration and similar cooldown. Thats not carpal tunnel inducing, while at the same time providing essentially a bard. This also gives them plenty of time to DPS (as 5 songs, x1.5s GCD if they're on GCD, is only 7.5 seconds. Assuming all on a 60 second timer that gives 50 seconds, 33 non song abilties if we're assuming a button press every GCD like WoW rogues, between needing to refresh songs. the longer timer spells would create a fun dynamic of working timer). Basically, without requiring more APM than WoW, you can create a bard class that is varied and fun to play.

popsicledeath_sl said:

The best dungeon crawling fighting to camps to be had was a few months after Kunark came out when loot and levels weren't too high yet, a lot of people were still camping Karnor's zone line, where trying to fight to and keep a camp in Old Seb was an all night affair. Especially trying to go to the kitchen area and there was an autopull bug in one of the hallways and 20 mobs would suddenly be on your ass.

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1. Having to kill each other before heading into Sebilis.
2. Having to camp out just past the first door to avoid aggroing the second floor onto your group.
3. SoW'd frogs fled at hyper fucking light speed. Like Selo's hyper. Snare please, yes, asking again.

Early Kunark left a few skid marks in my game psyche to say the least. But... you were on your fucking toes and half of the expansions' loot table was in that awesome dungeon.

More of those super dungeons please.

Herv_sl said:

1. Having to kill each other before heading into Sebilis.
2. Having to camp out just past the first door to avoid aggroing the second floor onto your group.
3. SoW'd frogs fled at hyper fucking light speed. Like Selo's hyper. Snare please, yes, asking again.

Early Kunark left a few skid marks in my game psyche to say the least. But... you were on your fucking toes and half of the expansions' loot table was in that awesome dungeon.

More of those super dungeons please.

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Agree. Please, more Seb's and Velk's and less straight hallways.

EQ2 - Brawler *loved the feel on how they jumped around and stuff
WoW - Druid *All WoW classes were so fucking bland and boring but the shape shifting into animals to do a certain role I found so cool. Probably my favorite MMO class
Vanguard - Monk *Loved chaining the moves and just loved the class. Loved all of VG combat actually (rip in peace)

Pasteton_sl said:

frenzied ghoul attacking way faster when he has fbss.

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Oh man. I still remember when I pulled the frenzied ghoul that had my FBSS on it. Knew it as soon as I got him back to the group.

Big W Powah!_sl said:

Yeah Fuck EQ Bards. They're not a beloved class or anything.

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A class so well-designed the dev team was forced to add macros and scriptingjust for that single classso non-spergs could play them properly.

Itzena_sl said:

A class so well-designed the dev team was forced to add macros and scriptingjust for that single classso non-spergs could play them properly.

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The implementation of bards was not ideal, no. Most EQ implementations weren't. The concept, however, is a solid and beloved one. Fuck, you're the type of fuckwad who walks into a house and go "I don't like the paint color. I'm NOT buying this house even though every other aspect of it has me creaming my pants and its half my budget. Fuck that paint."...

What the fuck.

I've explained this shit time and time again; You can do the class properly with today's technology without causing carpal tunnel. Can even improve in many ways. The reason you got carpal tunnel on bards is because they couldn't figure out a way to limit the number of songs up at any given time without giving them short ass durations causing you to go fucking stupid to keep them up. We've seen MANY games that limit spells of a certain type being active at once.

Thus, we have the technology to make him better.

Fuck off you fuckwads.

Ice/Kin Corrupter (CoX)

Kirun_sl said:

Agreed.

Seriously, all of the bards I knew who were legitimatelygoodat their class, hated it. The jokes about carpal tunnel are not overblown. The people who liked grouping with well-played bards, had one as an alt, or thought switching between Anthem de Arms and Cassindra's every now then, while tossing out an occasional boastful bellow or Kelin's? Sure, they think bards were the greatest thing ever.

The reality is that a well-played bard took probably more attention, focus, awareness, and APM than any other class in the game and the benefits they offered in return for that? Marginally better than their counterparts. In some cases, even worse. The bard effort required vs. reward merited was one of the worst ratios in the game.

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To me the fun of playing a bard all centered around all the multiple tools you had at your disposal to save your party from a wipe when the shit hit the fan.

I played a bard from day 1 of the game being released. Long before The Concert Hall message board became popular, the bard community used a mailing list to discuss all the various tricks the bard had up his sleeve. It was fun figuring out things like Lull pulling, charm kiting, fear kiting, etc. Numerous times before Kunark came out I would get a comment from someone along the lines of "I didn't know a bard could do that". It got even more fun when using Fading Memories for tough trash pulls became popular.

I hung out on the Concert Hall boards for several years and don't recall any of the good bards who posted there ever giving the impression they hated the class. I knew numerous bards on my server and none of them ever complained about the class ever.

Big W Powah!_sl said:

The implementation of bards was not ideal, no. Most EQ implementations weren't. The concept, however, is a solid and beloved one. Fuck, you're the type of fuckwad who walks into a house and go "I don't like the paint color. I'm NOT buying this house even though every other aspect of it has me creaming my pants and its half my budget. Fuck that paint."...

What the fuck.

I've explained this shit time and time again; You can do the class properly with today's technology without causing carpal tunnel. Can even improve in many ways. The reason you got carpal tunnel on bards is because they couldn't figure out a way to limit the number of songs up at any given time without giving them short ass durations causing you to go fucking stupid to keep them up. We've seen MANY games that limit spells of a certain type being active at once.

Thus, we have the technology to make him better.

Fuck off you fuckwads.

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The game that gave me carpal tunnel was the original Diablo. That was the first online game I ever played and it came out before I got married so there is no telling how many hours I put into that game. I'm right handed so I got carpal tunnel in my right wrist from all the mouse clicking. When playing a bard in EQ, I did all the twisting/keyboard pressing with my left hand and never once had any problems with carpal tunnel. It wasn't really that hard once you got into the rhythm of it and turned out to be the precursor to how other games incorporated rotations into their gameplay.

Kirun_sl said:

Except, like I mentioned, this "short-duration, but powerful" buffs thing was tried with vanilla WoW Paladins and people fucking hated it. Micromanaging buffs is even worse than micromanaging DoTs. At least with DoTs, you see a fairly tangible benefit to what you're doing. Buffs are entirely dependent on the skill, class, etc. of the person they are being given to.

Many people are clamoring forlessspastic gameplay in their MMOs, not more. It's one of the huge reasons cited for people playing FFXIV - it has an "oldschool" feel to it. Part of that oldschool feel is slower gameplay, longer GCDs, stuff like that. The EQ Bard is just more of the same spastic gameplay many people have grown tired of. It's a large part of all the flak levied at Wildstar. Sure, playing DDR for a boss encounter here and there is fine, even rewarding, at times. However, when literally every fight involves SC2 Diamond levels of APM? People get real sick of it, real quick.

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Are you seriously comparing 90 second group buffs that you hit as an attack essentially to having to target and buff 40 fucking people with a 5 minute buff? Cause, thats kinda apples and oranges. If you're referring to the original judgement/seal system, that was far and above the BEST implementation of the system. It just was weak. And was ALL you could do. If they had 3-4 attacks, and managing seals/judgements that intertwined with each other more meaningfully than they did? Fucking jesus christ, that sounds balls ass fun. And is far less spastic, but instead its tactical. Picking the right seal/judgement/seal combo for the situation would've been fun. And like NEEDING 5-6GCDS out of every like 100 to do that? Its far from spastic. Its fun and tactical to make meaningful choices in combat.

Bards in EQ was a class where you could tell immediately who knew their shit and who didn't.

Not going to sift through pages, but VG Bards were amazing.

I liked the design a song method used in VG for bards, and it would have been cool to see that translated to other games. Sadly, modern mmos seem to have removed the "support" archetype in most cases, probably due to how few people played enchanters/bards/shaman and other support classes in previous games. When you have 40 people in a raid and you only need 1-2 of a given archetype to get the job done, it really needs to be looked at. Instead, modern games opt to have the support abilities wrapped into the big three, which tends to make raid/encounter design a lot easier.

Bards in EQ were funny, in that even the great ones could easily be replaced with another class. Bonus points for having an out of group enchanter to log on and buff people. God the class design in that game was all over the place.

edit: replaced in groups. A single good dps far outweighed the benefits of a good bard in 90% of situations, unless your puller was the bard.

Rezz_sl said:

I liked the design a song method used in VG for bards, and it would have been cool to see that translated to other games. Sadly, modern mmos seem to have removed the "support" archetype in most cases, probably due to how few people played enchanters/bards/shaman and other support classes in previous games. When you have 40 people in a raid and you only need 1-2 of a given archetype to get the job done, it really needs to be looked at. Instead, modern games opt to have the support abilities wrapped into the big three, which tends to make raid/encounter design a lot easier.

Bards in EQ were funny, in that even the great ones could easily be replaced with another class. Bonus points for having an out of group enchanter to log on and buff people. God the class design in that game was all over the place.

edit: replaced in groups. A single good dps far outweighed the benefits of a good bard in 90% of situations, unless your puller was the bard.

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Good points. You COULD replace a bard with another class. But no class could pull, mez, charm, regen mana/health, and provide haste in all one class. A monk and an enchanter could do what a bard could. But a bard and a rogue was a stronger group. Also, the fact that bards were the only class with overhaste for quite some time made them invaluable for a melee heavy group. 3-4 melee damage classes and a bard was better than having an enchanter and 3-4 melee classes, one of which being a monk.

BUT, anyway, the ability to focus on support either through adps, debuffs, regens, etc.. excites me and many much more than "I has 40million DPS, a passive +10% spell power buff, and one single target exclusive CC"...At least design some encounters where providing some active support is far better than focusing on DPS.

Best fights ever on my lock in WoW were the vampire triplets in ICC and faction champs. I was the caster tank and a CC machine on those fights respectively. There needs to be more fights like that.

Yeah, it was weird. A good bard was awesome to have in a group depending on makeup, but they had issues fitting into certain paradigms effectively. For a class that was dedicated to nothing but mediocre/passable at a few different abilities, they had some strange synergies. SK puller/tanks absolutely destroyed a bard's usefulness if the group had a healer and buffer already, but replace that SK with a warrior or paladin and you have a crazy useful addition in a bard. Not to mention resist songs being basically required for early raiding fights. I chalk it up to yet another "we have no idea what we are doing" moment with the EQ development team, like FD and kiting and... hell, most the game.

Rezz_sl said:

Yeah, it was weird. A good bard was awesome to have in a group depending on makeup, but they had issues fitting into certain paradigms effectively. For a class that was dedicated to nothing but mediocre/passable at a few different abilities, they had some strange synergies. SK puller/tanks absolutely destroyed a bard's usefulness if the group had a healer and buffer already, but replace that SK with a warrior or paladin and you have a crazy useful addition in a bard. Not to mention resist songs being basically required for early raiding fights. I chalk it up to yet another "we have no idea what we are doing" moment with the EQ development team, like FD and kiting and... hell, most the game.

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This is all true. However, SKs made shitty pullers til Velious at least.

BUT, arguments about shitty class design in EQ are endless.

My point is that a number of support based classes could effectively work. A class that served the function of an EQ shaman; Less healy, more debuff/buff oriented. The bard for short duration very powerful buffs. The enchanter for their new spellproc mechanic and focus on CC. The ideas behind the classes are incredibly solid. The execution is what isn't.

As I said before, the fights I had most fun with were fights where I wasn't tethered to meters and was allowed to perform various roles that were more than "beat the snobby warrior with a higher GearScore on the meters"..That doesn't exist in modern games, and if it does someone point me to the game where teamwork matters and you can do something out of the box instead of "shitty traditional tank or health bar whack a mole or meter whore".