Player vs. Everything: Coolest classes ever

[Kazgrim]

Thirding AC2 Tactician, and pretty much a great deal of the rest of their classes.

392nding "wtf, wow Hunter?" Ranger with pet was common in many games before wow (ac2 to name one), hell even EQ rangers eventually got a shitty pet.

Also, wtf COH? worst "class" design ever. Start with 5 generic roles and then give players diversity and options on how to accomplish that role...except wait, half the power sets were gimp and flat out failed at accomplishing the generic role the class was supposed to accomplish. Only reason no one gives a shit out how bad the class design was is because the developers religiously nerfed the shit out of everything every fucking patch to make sure the malibu barbie alt-aholic playerbase didn't suffer for making stupid decisions on what skills they selected. gogo 5 slot sprint ftl. I swear its the only MMO i've played where I felt like I was being punished for reading what my abilities did and then applying things like math and logic to them.

[goatface]

i thought COH had some very cool classes. I quit because of nerfs, but more as they going anyway from their first idea of what a hero was supposed to be.

The main problem with most of the nerfs , there were several builds that were just so far out of wack, like fire controllers and the 18 monkeys of doom etc. but they would apply a nerf that would fuck over everyone in the class.

anyway

i vote for coolest class, doac's savage, pre nerfs was one of the most fun melee classes i played.

[Arbitrary]

For CoH they should have just boosted some of the shittier powers and designed encounters for the endgame that assumed everyone would be fucking broken.

They went the other way and not only pussed out on an endgame but they nerfed a ton of things into the ground to boot.

[Fammaden]

I thought CoX had some pretty interesting classes, but you never actually seemed to have to use abilities to complement each other in groups since the default strategy was just to gather a bunch of players and zerg the hell out of everything. Not even necessarily zerging but no interdependency or strategy that required people to work together and use their heads to beat anything. They wouldn't even have had to make a healing paradigm per se either, just make some of the widespread crowd control techniques actually vital and pivotal towards completing the big missions. I never really got to bleeding edge end game levels though, but from what I hear there is nothing there anyway.

[Lambourne]

Agree with most of what has been said, but I would also like to mention EQ's monk class, in their puller and hand-to-hand dps role. Shows you don't need 30 hotkeys worth of abilities to have a fun and challenging class.

I'll add another 'wtf hunter' too. I have a level 70 one and although generally fun to play I wouldn't say they stand out compared to other classes, and the hidden cast time shot rotation is one of the most retarded concepts ever. If you don't read EJ you could be halving your potential dps and never know it, since the game gives you absolutely zero information about this, while it spoonfeeds you everything else you might need to know.

[kasey]

Originally Posted by Cuppycake

but the WoW priest class is fundamentally flawed as a healing class with cloth armor and its only defensive core ability is useless versus players

fixed =)

[Genjiro]

Mastermind in City of Villains was great. That class = tank + pet class + debuff class. It uses a mode called bodyguard, which places your henchmen into protective mode and splits all damage the mastermind takes up between you + all your pets. It has 3 tier one pets (the grunts), two tier 2 pets (generally the dps pets), and a final boss pet that is good damage and can take a beating. In bodyguard mode with all 6 pets, it mitigates like 85% of incoming damage, spreading it out to all your henchman that can be healed up etc.

For ex: Ninja powerset as your primary, gets the foot soldier Genin that shoot shurikens, kick etc. The tier 2 Jounin (think Tenchu) stealth assassin ninjas that hide which gives them criticals like a rogue, have wrist crossbows that shoot poison darts etc, and a final boss pet of a firebreathing Oni demon warrior. Probably my favorite class in any game to play, bar none. Its fucking ninjas for Christ sake.

Some other game is going to take this idea and run with it for fantasy. It makes more fucking sense than a warrior does anyways. Call it a general, he summons pets, maybe has formations like that Rome mmo idea had, and uses the pets to take damage for him. Makes a million times more fucking sense than warrior to me, but the limitation is fantasy mmo's have 40 players + pets, CoH had 8 for most everything you do in that game, meaning pet lag wasn't a limiting factor really. However, how fucking awesome would it be for a General calling out commands in a raid for his pet troops using some ability like Hold the Line! (hi Gladiator), or Phalanx/Shield wall to converge and absorb a big fucking hit. It gives me a giant Maximus sized boner just thinking about it.

Monk in EQ of course was great, with good agro AI, and the ability to fd pull. You could easily see the skill between a good one and one who sucked, and that was our little niche (Im biased though).

I''d have to agree with Zehn on a lot of the Vanguard class ideas.

Blood mage in VG was pure awesome in beta, no idea if it changed but it was unique, powerful, and took thought to play as a healing class where damage was important as well. Very, very well done.

Also the idea of having equipment slots for pets is amazing like the VG necro, and more games need to expand on some of the VG classes. Combining this idea with the aforementioned fantasy general class where you could equip all your pets with armor and weapons would be.....well there is no word, so I will make one up.......scrumtralescent.

[Fammaden]

The thing that annoyed me about mastermind was redoing all the pets and their buffs every time I zoned.

[Duppin]

God, yes. Did they ever fix that, or is that still what you have to do?

[Angerz]

Originally Posted by Duppin

God, yes. Did they ever fix that, or is that still what you have to do?

Pretty sure they haven't

[Mithrull]

Animist from DAoC. Though they nerfed them all to hell through the years, playing one during sieges was sweet. No other class like it.

Fixer from AO. Gotta be the Fixer, not the Adventurer. Fixers were basically hackers that were privy to private zones that no one else could access and shortened travel time across the map. Also were the primary run buff class.

[Dashal]

Friar in DAoC was very cool, and the very similar Disciple from Vanguard.

[Elsebet]

Priest in WoW, followed by DAoC's Healer and Doctor in AO are my favorite healers, although admittedly I played a Cleric not a Blood mage in Vanguard. The Priest, as of TBC, just had so much versatility to take care of mutliple people taking damage (renew the tank, shield the mage, PoM the hunter, CoH the group, etc).

DAoC's healer was the perfect mix of healing/cc for me, since I enjoy both. The LOTR minstrel is close since they have fear for evil creatures, but alas their mez is only for undead. As a minstrel I am also lacking any kind of instant "oh shit" abilities thus far (as of level 25).

AO's doctor is more a favorite due to the overall lore of the class as their healing toolset was simply adequate considering many of their mitigation abilities required enormous ncu space (the hots and temp hp buff, ugh).

I rate healer classes based on my own confidence level going into challenging encounters with the tools I am given, that's why I think the WoW Priest is tops.

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Elsebet

AO's doctor is more a favorite due to the overall lore of the class as their healing toolset was simply adequate considering many of their mitigation abilities required enormous ncu space (the hots and temp hp buff, ugh).

Its odd you describe it this way. Did you play one? Doctors don't mitigate damage solely through ncu consuming self and team buffs. Doctors mitigate the majority of incoming damage with init debuffs. The difference between a mob thats unslowed and a mob that loses nearly 3k to all initiatives is tremendous.

Its especially funny with ranged mobs. One shot every 10-15 seconds LOL Hell, i'd get bored a lot just standing there waiting for my kids 15k enforcer to lose enough health to even bother healing him while duoing missions 40 levels higher than us. Fight starts, init debuff, Mongo, wait............ CH, Mongo, wait.............. CH, Mongo, wait..........

[Flinch]

Ninja in FFXI, particularly in the way that it evolved into a tanking class that the designers hadn't intended it to be.

Samurai was also an interesting attempt at creating a different kind of DPS class. Corsair and Puppetmaster classes also look interesting, although I quit playing FFXI before they were implemented.