The Spirit Realm

you have to pay to "respec", cheap first but cost is raising. If I remember you gain 1 point to spend in specialization / level and you lose 1 point when you "respec".

the nightmare part of WoW (or Lotro which a copy of wow) is that you have to pay alot to keep your armor repaired and you better play and farm alot outside raidtime if you die 3 or 4 times learning a new event. the gold sink there is awfull. I played WoW to max level, after it was just endless grind to get factions up or stupid PVP. I'm playing Lotro atm and it looks like it is the same, reached lvl 50, nightmarish farming to make tradeskills usefull (trying not to raid in lotro so i will not make comments on raiding there)

I think it would be kind of cool to see, say for the 80-85 trek, that each class has to pick one of two (or three) different, mutually exclusive paths.

When AAs first came out, some had some, others had others. There was variety among players of a particular class. Now, everyone gets "the good ones" first, and there's less (noticeable) difference.

Not that I want to lose groups because I'm a "type B" Shaman and they want a "type C", but I think some either-ors would improve the game.

On the contrary, i think what EQ needs is less complexity, and almost a convergence of several classes to make class balance, itemization, etc easier. Right now there's a huge disparity between the dps output of "dps" classes, a huge disparity between the healing ability of healing clases, etc, such that everything is out of whack between half the clases, and this is asside from the melee vs caster balance as far as damange etc goes.

Right now melee have much higher survivability than casters AND do significantly more damage for longer periods of time, sort of negating any 'advantages' that 'pure dps' classes without heavy armor were originally supposed to have. Since there are SO many classes in EQ however, it is going to be a significant effort looking at each individual class each ability, each spell / spell line, etc to try to get parity of some sort.

If classes were more convergant towards their archtype (caster dps, melee dps, tank, healer) then it would be easier to start doing things like setting "dps values" to linked spell lines and normalizing them across classes for a particular level, to adjust NPC resist systems such that casting dps isnt so hit and miss, etc. Then you could have each class do it's dps in it's own 'flavor' but then balance everything overall much better. Then if they find a category needs to do more, or less, or whatever of what they do, they bump each of the linked spell groups together and address everyone at once.

I do not envy the devs in their attempt to try to do /some/ sort of class balancing, because EQ is just too complex of a system as it is currently. What really needs to happen is that it gets simplified, like other games are all doing. WoW works because when you have a DPS class, they all do close to the same DPS as eachother, making them interchangeable, it's the other things like specific buffs or debuffs that they bring that makes diversifying beneficial, but as far as raw dps, they're basically the same, just varying in how they do their damage. (range melee vs pet vs spell vs melee, etc)

Hmm. How would converging lines, say, CLR/DRU/SHM at L80 into "Priest" at L85 work?

Most restrictive armor? Least restrictive? What about SHM-only gear; can a Priest wear it? Only SHM-Priests?

Seems easier to just give the SAME FREAKING HEALS to each class and give Priest gear, and leave the classes segregated.

That's more or less what i'm saying, not to combine the classes, but to equalize them, preferably at the top of each of their ranges. So say druids are the best dps of the priest classes, and clerics the best healers, balance out shm dru clr heals to be the same level as clerics (heck, same spells, different names would work) and the nukes to be the same overall dps between the classes, whatever) Thus the 3 priest classes truly WOULD be interchangeable for a group, and then the /other/ stuff that they bring, what specific buffs you get from them, porting, slowing, or whatever, are the 'bonuses' for that one class vs some other class. In this particular case I'd do soemthing along the lines of giving clerics much bigger nukes and some more utility, bringing shaman nukes up a bit (because really, dots dont cut it unless your'e soloing with they way they're created currently, they take too long) and increase shaman healing to cleric levels, bring druid healing up to cleric levels and maybe enhance their debufff lines a bit and tweak their DSs and the like to be more desireable / group friendly / whatever. But the main thing would be each of the healers can heal the same, plug one in and play, yet at the same time give each of the healing classes enough dps and other utility that you can have more than one in a group and not be redundant / still have a roll to play albiet a differnet roll.

The same ought to be done with the cloth casters, melee dps, etc. It really comes down to 3 major archtypes in an MMO, tanking, healing, dps. You SHOULD be able to plug in any class that fills its archetype roll in and have a viable group.

Vanguard=Factions/Diplomacy system, stances, and targeting system

EQ= Raids, huge replay value, quests, guild hall, campfires, banners, and longevity.

WoW=Friendly to enter, creative class mechanics. best tradeskill system, offline trading, UI mechanics, and polish.

EQ2=Best religion system, UI mechanics, guilds system, offline trading and play housing.

Ultima Online=Umm, everyone does everything better?

DoAC=Meh, WoW has better everything

Asheron's Call=Coolest guild concept, Monarchy.