everquest: why i hope i never play a paladin

well anita broke my laptop. she knocked a bunch of water on it and it's dead. so im on my old laptop now. aka hers. i forgot that this was my main laptop before. the one i'd been using for awhile was my box pc. so i got on EQ and was amazed by the graphics. i loaded my character and did a few /whos to see who was on. there were familiar faces but after a hello i got off. i dont know what it is but i just can't play that game. and it's a shame because it looks beautiful. spahz's been playing with dind for a bit. i hit the played on dind before i got off and its over 400 days. you can thank bazaar time and box use for that. dind was started in 2000. and its interesting to get on and see him still around. i guess its probably would ben would find if he got on his character. he's the owner of the shaman i used to group with. i took control of him after he left. storm spirits is still continuing and thats cool. in my own way i played my own role in that continuation. daer still is visibly tagged on vg's site. that was always an interesting turn of events. spahz is trying to get me to get the expansion. im just not sure. i think im just sick of the game. i mean i played the shit out of it.

the last time they had a guk revamp for instance. i farmed the fuck out of those fbss's. that set me up real nice in the bank. but i never needed to use the cash. in a way that was kinda like the final aa. see everquest is fun in raiding. but just standing around its hell. and my class is just a bore. get aggro of stuff and then just spam stuns. i probably like pierce more. the cleric heals are more clutch. but then with the mudflation that becomes easy too. so the only enduring challenge is dps. and the only challenging dps is caster. and the reason why is their abilities are active. rogues monks and the like have passive dps. which means the player can't influence it much. but with a caster you have to have a strategy to your ability use. and to me thats a bit more appealing. thoughtful gaming over thoughtless gaming. i dont know what it is but i can't play that character. maybe its the game maybe its just the character. i have yet to figure it out. but i did enjoy my cleric. over on fv. and anita did enjoy her wizard. in my opinion those are some of the more fun classes in the game. i dont understand why they would code in boring classes. aggro is not really hard enough to gain to be a challenge. at a certain point any additional ability is futile.

i guess the point is it should always be useful to do something. i can understand that the knights are tailored to be a certain kind of unit. but everquest doesnt do that very well for the paladins. penalized for being a heavy. also penalized for being a healer. and the healing is penalized against the heavy. and the heavy is penalized against the healing. paladins have alot of penalizations. they may have an array of abilities but its painful to access them. and if it isnt painful to access them they may be ineffective. this is all derived from the context of the game. firstly from the peers. other classes can more or less seamlessly do their job. you don't see the pains they have to go through that equate ours. and secondly the pains of ours become the pains of the raid. and because of that raids choose not to have us. its almost in the raids interest to go with the seamless class. the warrior tank. they basically make most content possible. without them events suddenly become impossible. the monopoly on tank roles by warriors has always irked knights. this is where their hybrid abilities penalize their tanking. i have always thought the penalization should come through dps. tanking ability should be a level playing field. but with the current setup tanks are encouraged to be warriors.

if a tank isnt a warrior they face much difficulty especially in raid tanking roles. the penalizations directly effect their ability to tank which directly effects the scenario the clerics have to remedy. without enough ability the wrong tank can put the healers in an untenable situation where success is impossible as mana leaves too fast or heals don't hit their mark and the tank dies killing the raid. from a leader standpoint this has always been a pain. more or less if youre a knight and youre participating in a raid your armor will never see much use on the boss mob. the only action youll see is on the trash mobs that basically fill the gap between you and your goal which don't individually hold any importance and generally make knights feel unimportant. i suppose you could blame the coders on this. trash mobs should not be worthless and if they had importance knights would have more importance. if the trash wasnt just a means to keep you from the event but also perhaps part of the event then those knights become useful. but ive always thought the strengths of knights never undid the penalization of tanking which in theory they are supposed to do. warriors always outdo knights. and this is a flaw because knights are tanks beyond all else. hybrid healing is a toy and not a dependable ability.

the penalizations on hybrid healing make it hard to rely on. your mana will drain fast, your target will be healed for very little, your cast time will be very long, and you wont be able to sustain a player during an event if they are taking sustained damage beyond your penalized heal capacity. these abilities are not balanced around use but more cut back due to overlapping abilities of the class. because of this i dont think coders often think about how usable many of our abilities really are in the game world on challenging content which arguably is the most entertaining content as challenging content remains challenging for longer especially if its cutting edge. as a raid leader i was always frustrated by the uselessness of my own class and the usefullness of my own boxed cleric. its really humiliating when a character you have built up fleshed out with aa's camped all the augs for, recieved many favors for, and put many hundreds of hours into ends up being less effective than a character whom you have only played a day or so of played time with easily attainable gear and novice level skill on the widely accepted current content of immense challenge at that given time. this is one of the main reasons i lost interest in investing time in a poorly designed class.