New classFollow

What about a new class that has to be unlocked after certain requirement reached on main toon, or certain playtime on the toon. They could call it King or Queen based on sex of toon. These guys could have all the kewl lines from the classes like Lay Hands, Snare line, Res line, Harm Touch, slow line, some kind of pet lets go with court jester, heal line, nuke line, dot line :)

Yes this would be unbalanced but weeeeeeeee !

O I just restarted game a month ago, so I would never been able to meet the requirement, but hey want you guys to have a blast with King or Queen !!!!!

As fun as a new twist on the classes could be, it is probably a practical impossibility and a nightmarish scenario for the developers.

Class Balance is probably the source of the biggest amount of angst and anger the Devs face from the player base. If you've never had the pleasure, just casually browse the official EQ boards sometime. Witness for yourself, the childish antics of people who can't enjoy EQ without extreme jealousies of everyone else's class and the endless paranoia that every class but their own is overpowered and they personally aren't getting enough.

It's challenging for many legitimate issues that deserve developer attention to even be addressed, when it turns into politicking for whatever when the majority of regular posters there would rather troll for their own cause than participate in a productive manner for the betterment of the game.

I just can't imagine a new class and the drama that would be caused if it had any significantly useful/interesting/powerful abilities. It would inevitably step on the toes of roles divvied out to existing classes and lead to balance work the Devs sadly will never have more time to devote to.

A new class or classes is only feasable if one accepts the retirement and/or merging of present classes. So rather unlikely...

Too many classes is basically the argument used from a dev standpoint for no new epics. Consider the pages of rants about "cookie cutter spreadsheet itemization" --adding a 17th class doesn't help that either.

WoW broke the "taboo race/class" barrier with their last expac... maybe EQ devs finally concede some new options.

Barring that, we're better off championing for a feature that they can sell in an expac. My attempt:

New combat bar with 5 gems on it. These 5 gems are activated via new AAs that allow you to multiclass. Multiclassing AA trees are carefully constructed to not create godmode, however, there is not reason to not allow a warrior to AA spec for casting temp as an AA ability on a reasonable timer. Or to allow tracking and various bow skills to other classes. Not every core ability of a class would be provided via these AA, but appealling stuff would.

If my chanter could track and use a bow... I'd play it for sure. Such a system even provides the excuse for a new tag on weapons "multiclassable" so that the bows usable by chanters (as per the example above) could be constrained within very specific content. Note that this could provide a revival of use of a place like Kunark if it was deemed the "multiclass gear source".

Anyways, a rough concept that would need tons of tweaking to work, but as likely as seeing a new class in EQ.

It took about a year before they made sense. When they launched, they were kind of a joke.

They've missed the boats on the epics a couple of times.

Realistically, they just need to add 2 updates per expac (or even every other expac) for the epics:
1. A grouper-aimed quest stage that promote each epic to elite-quality grouper item.
2. An end-raid flagged quest that promotes the epic to end-game raider quality.

These updates could be the same task for all classes. The epicness remains in the full quest (that many have already done.

They'd be far wiser to keep adding single steps to all the cool old quests (i.e., ivy etched, newb armor, ring war, secret of the planes, BIC, etc.) rather than worrying that they need to create massive lines from scratch. Make me need the old content in a fun way again, especially if you (the devs) insist on not revamping it all.

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The armor model excuse is extremely lame. For example, erudites have leather models (and always have). Also, just using the Ykesha pirate models for the missing silk models would close most of the "gaps". OR... just make ogre, troll, etc. silk look exactly the same as leather (aka flag the leather model as silk for them).

Either way, minimmal dev time to overcome the "issue".

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WoW opened up at least one "taboo" race/class combo to promote some low-level replayability to go along with the 2 new races. Thurgadin heritage dwarves have knowledge of practically every class in the game --it's not a big reach to add many cool options.

Nothing is ever that easy. Especially with the way EQ is coded. The Ykesha pirate models are separate models (likely the armor is part of those models, and not on top of them).

If you flag the leather as silk, then they would get complaints by silk users who can't wear silk. I hold out hope that every expansion, they will release the long promised new character models. I still look to see if it's there, but not yet.

I guess I should give my own opinion too. :)

Did the berserker class make sense? No, just added another melee dps class, imho.

Could a new class make sense. Well, maybe more than the berserker did. Lets look at the classes and the roles, roughly (group point of view):

Melee dps: rogue, ranger, berserker, monk
Caster dps: wizard, magician, necromancer
Tanks: shadowknight, paladin, warrior
Healing: cleric, shaman, druid
CC: enchanter, bard
Hybrid: beastlord

So it should not be a dps class. But perhaps a melee CC. How could that make sense? I don't know I ain't a developer, but a CC with melee instead of songs or spells. I know the berserker have some skills like that, but how often have you seen a berserker answering when a group is looking for a CC?

In all honesty, I would like a new class. But being that the developers have a hard time balancing classes as they are already, I doubt a new class would be of any use. We have utility classes, hybrids, melee, healers, dps, etc. What other classes would you suggest making? How do you balance that new class among the others? Do you steal abilities from other classes and incorporate those abilities into the new class? Do you think it would outrage people if they did that?

Edited, Oct 13th 2011 12:23pm by missjackie