Seems I poked the ant nest a little, sparking a bit of a conversation with my last minipost. Not that I’m claiming credit for anything but sparking some thoughts, though; these fine folk are doing the heavy lifting:
I’ve commented at their places, so I’ll keep this short and hit something I haven’t touched on there, speaking of specialization and generalization. (Since one of the tangential topics is about players and their approach to their characters, as well as how characters fit into MMO design.)
From Robert Heinlein:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Disclosure: I work at a small gaming studio, where I’ve carved out a niche of being a multifaceted employee. I’m primarily an artist, but I dabble in design, animation, even scripting. I love that I can be a bit of a generalist, as it makes me valuable in more situations, and keeps things interesting. I’m not as fine of a painter as my concept artist buddies, who paint all day every day, but I’m happy where I am. This is also why I’m not a minor cog in a big studio like Disney or EA, where I would be a specialist. I’ve been there, and I didn’t care for it. That said, those specialist positions don’t threaten me… they just don’t interest me.
I also play a Druid character in World of Warcraft. It’s the most flexible class, and I latched onto it precisely because it does allow the greatest variety in play. And flight form. I love that.
(Oh, and as I noted at Rowan’s place, I’d push it further and let passive and maybe even active abilities persist on the character, no matter the class. I loved Final Fantasy Tactics for how I could build a strong character by pulling from a variety of jobs/classes. I could keep a Ninja ability on my Knight, and it was great fun. I’d love to see that in an MMO.)
Heh, the thing is that you are a generalist within a very specialized field. You only get a society where working on entertainment is a viable career choice when specialization of roles has covered all the other things you would have to do to keep alive. Butchered many hogs of late? Heinlein was always one for a grand vision that ignored inconvenient realities.
That said, I don’t have any real objection to Blizz, as an example, selling a class change option for $25. I doubt I would avail myself of it. I wouldn’t have picked the classes I did if I didn’t want to play them. Like you, I favor the druid, of which I think I have five, including two on the same server on the same faction. I also have a high level paladin, which can play the three key roles, and a high level hunter, which is the most independent class in my opinion.
True… but if I were in a farming community, a hunter-gatherer tribe or pretty much anywhere else, I’d still generalize. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate specialists, just that I’d rather be 80-90% proficient in a lot of things than focus on being the top 1% in one thing. It’s just my approach to life.
I agree that the Hunter is a great class as well. It’s the one I play the most after my Druid.
I think the distinction of what is a character – how do we identify with our avatars, has added another important aspect to this whole debate. If you *are* your main and approach all things from that one-journey perspective, like I do, multiclassing is the way to go. accumulative progress would of course be greatest of all. didn’t UO allow for this? I remember faintly being able to have several grand master titles, meaning mastery of different schools and skills.
Alts draw very hard lines between different entities. if you don’t identify much with your main, alts have their appeal. In that context, I find Kleps’ argument of loss of character identity kinda interesting….because for me, alts destroy character identity like nothing else. 🙂 it all sounds upside down to me to claim multiclassing would do this. but then, I am my character always, much more than I am my class.
Indeed. So much of this really is about playstyle, it seems to me. Since there are more than a few of those, I naturally lean to providing more options.
In my comment above, I meant to say “I would NOT avail myself of it.” My fingers have their own agenda.
Or maybe I could learn to read my own writing. Bleh.
Well, there *is* a difference between expressing doubt and writing that you wouldn’t use it. So… it all works. 😉
I am with you, I like to generalize as well, generally speaking (sorry). I played a Rogue in WOW for a long time though, and I thought it was terrible game design that they only had access to a single role. It made some sense initially when they were clearly better at that role than classes with access to multiple roles, but as the game went on, that became less and less the case. It just seemed unfair that other people could get vastly more utility out of their class, without a penalty of any sort.
While I am a generalist, that doesn’t mean that I expect my character to be great at everything. It also doesn’t mean that I expect my be able to do everything well on a single character. I loved playing a Druid because I could, on the fly, fill in a different role in an emergency to pick up slack during combat, or, out of combat, switch to another role I was equally good at playing.
However, I do believe that needs to be balanced in the context of the game so that hyper-specialized classes that don’t get anything from being hyper-specialized (like my rogue) aren’t inferior.
Of course, this all seems like an issue with games designed around classes rather than filling roles. In a skill-based game, you could generalize or specialize along those roles, but not be forced into this pre-conceived archetype. I would’ve killed to be a rogue-esque character who could viably evasion tank or do solid damage, but I had to sacrifice that vision due to how stringent class design was in that game.
Evasion tanking would be great. I’ve thought that WoW Rogues should have a spec for that for a while now.
You’re right, a skill based game really does work better along these lines, though.
I’m not sure about the “hybrid tax”, though. What I’d rather see is special utility for Rogues or Mages. I think DPS slots should be capably filled by any class, but maybe Rogues get an extra stun or an emergency evasion tanking cooldown, that sort of thing (like a Rogueish version of popping Bear Form in a pinch while otherwise playing a Cat Form Druid).
I don’t want to resurrect arguments I was having years ago, for both our sakes.
I just simply think it is unfair that Druids have so much more variety, even if they don’t have access to it at all once, than a Rogue or a Mage. And as long as the game is designed and balanced pretty rigidly along the lines of tank-healer-dps, then a little added utility for those pure classes doesn’t make up what I feel is a significant gap in overall class fun.
Plus, at least around TBC when I was very serious about the game, hybrids (with some definite exceptions) brought utility that guaranteed them a spot whether they were capable of topping the charts DPS-wise or not. I thought that was a nice compromise, that strengthened the overall depth of the game.
We could probably argue about it until we are both blue in the face though!
I do wonder about the raiding scene, which really isn’t of much interest to me other than as a designer. If the hybrid utility doesn’t get used, whether because of game design or because the raid team doesn’t understand it, doesn’t that just make them a subpar DPS character, causing a different sort of stress?
…maybe it’s really just another argument for more loosely tuned raids, though. As in, ones where either the utility or the purist DPS edge are sufficient, albeit for different reasons.
I don’t really have a horse in the raid race, so I’m not one to argue about such things. 😉
In TBC, the hybrids who typically did DPS along with bringing unique buffs contributed less individual damage, but increased overall raid damage with their utility. The complexity of play was largely the same for hybrids and specialized DPS. The issue arose from one side having a harder to quantify value, which led to a perception that they were inferior and not useful.
In a nutshell, a DPS chart oriented culture reshaped player perceptions of value on the individual level.
While I haven’t played the most recent iterations of WoW, it seemed like their design philosophy was heading toward equalizing both the utility of hybrids and the extra damage of specialized classes, so the DPS role would be a single entity rather than two fairly separate sub-roles.
I am not entirely sure how I’d fix it from a design perspective. I’ve always thought that replacing Damage with Utility as your third leg of the trinity might work. Then damage could be somewhat equally distributed across all classes/roles as a byproduct of doing their job, not its point.
Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that.
Replacing Damage with Utility would be interesting, I think. It could provide for more tactical and varied play. (And tanks often times wind up with big damage anyway.) DPS charts definitely have their downsides.