| I recall stats meaning something in EQ before it was trivial to max out your stamina and other major stats(but mostly sta since it was hard to get up, and universally wanted, making high sta items somewhat coveted and higher in value)
But I digress...
I disagree that characters should have little differentiation. I've always advocated different templates, and of course, Everquest never allowed that. I've played many different types of Sorceresses, amazons, barbarians, and there are many more times as many templates for diablo2, I'd rather have that sort of system than a cookie cutter one in which everyone had a nova-sorc, or something.
I suppose I accepted long ago that to avoid gimping a character, one had to do a degree of research on one's selection before character creation.
With the advent of betas being more or less pre-release playtime, it shouldn't be difficult to make an educated guess at what sort of template will fit your needs, before WoW hits shelves(along with other mmorpgs), as long as designers don't radically change/upgrade/nerf things.
Allowing templates gives rise to replayability, offer flavors for a player to be different, encourages ingenuity(My friends and I were some of the first spear barbarians back in 1.01 in diablo2, when we 'hacked' into the mpq and other data files, to find the damage of the pike), and trains players to be more skillfull. |