If an encounter can’t be done without a stamina buff in the group, then do you need a priest or just a stamina buff on legs?

What’s the difference between “niche protection” and “identity construction”?

One other thing is that pen and paper games tend to be all about describing what you do and then rolling dice. They’re differentiated by roleplaying fluff as much as anything else. Classes in computer games can be made to actually play differently from each other — you’re really acting out the role in a more direct way.

I personally believe dual classing in WoW to be a sign that the Anti-Christ is already on earth.

Yes, I might be the only dual-classing hater left on this planet, but let me be the prophet of doom: The rise of the hybrid in WoW is very apparent in armory scans. I say this was totally unnecessary, as tank classes like warriors in prot spec were given already increased soloability.

I always wondered that people lamented that their Paladins could not compete with a Warlock in soloability, i.e. downing mobs as fast. They were more durable, next to impossible to kill, and could kill fast later on. Nowadays they kill faster and are even harder to kill. Note, I played both Paladin and Warlock and if I ever had a gripe with the Paladin, it was not that I felt I had to kill stuff faster.

So yeah, either go the whole way towards making everyone equal and give players a chance to express themselves through personal player skill (hard to do in most MMOs, actually) or if your game has classes, make sure that classes stay unique and have their special strengths and weaknesses.

Moonkin Druids were often not taken by players because of “not enough DPS” in Moonkin form. Then they gave the buggers superb DPS AND a elemental resistances debuff similar to my Warlocks Curse of Elements.

The idea was to make classes more interchangeable. But well, given the extremely lowly “mass AoE” way all WOTLK 5-man-instances played (YAWN) I really had my gripes with this and quit after one month of WOTLK. And having killed the dudettes in Naxx already before some people even had entered for the first time – ok, just needed this for my ego!

So yeah, either do away with classes or make them meaningful. What Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street did in WOTLK seems totally wrong to me. I like this guy and his qualities as a community manager and the way he communicates with players, but regarding class design and the imba at release Death Knights, I think he wants to impose a classless system upon a world build upon the very same classes he almost tries to abolish or even worse, to reduce them to Tank, DPS, Healer. They also created special forums for the simplified trinity, brr…

In games like Vampire, the different clans did have different abilities but their niches were more from a storytelling point of view. The idea of putting together a ‘balanced group’ didn’t really work. At most you’d get some psychic type abilities and some combat type.

I do think though that if every player can instantly switch to any class, a group of players has less reason to socialise outside that group unless there’s anything more in the game to encourage socialising. (ie. much easier for it to become a ‘less-massive MO’)

I guess I’m not a unique snowflake. Thanks Spinks!

It is interesting to note that while character development perhaps has become more open-ended and less “on rails”, the mission/quest aspect of MMOs has rather gone the other way in many cases.