Obviously, the encounters have to be designed so that a competent raid group can down them first time – they need to give clues as to their special abilities and how to respond to them. It would certainly separate the players who know their classes and can think on their feet from the robots who just follow other people’s strategies from the net though

I’m both looking forward to ToR and somewhat dreading it.

Of course, those locations will very quickly be detailed all over the internet, and the beaten path will go straight to them… unless he means that this content is dynamically placed wherever players aren’t going very much currently (which would be a cool idea, but not what I think he’s getting at).

I actually have a few friends that purposefully like underpowered combos. So I wouldn’t say ”anyone”, I’d say ”only a select few may.” Just to point out.

While I play melee often-it honestly DOES depend fully on the game. Back in Vanilla and the first half of TBC I played a mage, because I preferred the mage over all the other classes(though I almost was a Warlock and still wonder if I had ran with that what it would have been like.) In ToR, I think I want to try it-after eleventy billion dollars dropped into it I have to-but I honestly think a ranged looks more appealing here(In Space Games(tm) I often tend toward ranged offering for some reason.) in WAR I was a DoK, which meant I had both melee and healing-at the same time, so melee support there. Aion I’m a melee, though the most powerful classes *far and wide* are ranged, bar none, hands down, no contest-melee are just sorta sidekicks.

LotRO I’m not sure what I’d play, but I’d likely try out a few classes.

Stealth Healer sounds quite fun though I admit, and different.

I really don’t know what the ideal way to design classes is. I mean, I think about and write ”if I made an MMO…” I will say while i sometimes joke about how ranged end up favored often, I imagine the balance *is* difficult.

The more I think about it, though, I blame when the encounters are super-tightly tuned. I think a game with encounters which are tuned a little more on the wing allows for a bigger range of people. If theres a spec of rogue that say, specializes in debuffs, planting bombs around the enemy and such-not the highest DPS but has a lot of overall utility(maybe even some first aid kit stuff), a super-tightly tuned encounter might not care about them much, but a more fast and loose one can allow them to have fun.

I see a lot of tension though, people are going to play through the storyline because they like the class and are picking the options that look fun, then finding out later that the class are not desired in groups or not good in terms of balance. It’s going to be hard to ignore the whole balance thing, but Bioware could be smarter about it and go with a ‘softer’ trinity, where tanks are not required but 1 or 2 heavies could be used instead.

Nevermind the content/polish, I suspect a lot of WoW players go in with balance as a top concern, but any new game just out the doors is going to struggle under those expectations.

I would be amazed if they aren’t doing something like this. The other equally likely possibility is that everyone gets the same story with small cosmetic differences because they’re scared of getting whined at because “she got something cooler than me – it’s not fair.”

In regards to whether or not the game will be spoiled if they overthink it too much, Im not worried, only way that could happen is if they *reveal* too much of how they science our behavior out. What I mean is that if I feel like everything has been planned out, that I will go from that point to this, chose this spec, go exploring there and find “secret spot” all on my own over on pre-set loaction 5, THEN I’ll have a problem. It was kind of that feeling I personally got from leveling in Cata.