Wish Warcraft would beef up mages some. We could use a mage remake wave.

For quite some time in Ultima there were only two “classes” you were either a tank mage or you were a goddamned thief. It wasn’t until meditation was added and healing was reworked that you had more defined class templates, but even at that point you only had about 3 classes, Mage, Dexxer, and Thief.

To make matters worse for people who would transition to Everquest, Ultima was never about killing mobs. They were there, you got loot from them, and they got your skills up, but all but the most difficult of creatures could be soloed by relatively new characters. The most difficult mobs in the game were easily killable once you had a decent character.

Ultima was all about the other people in the game with you, and grouping was something you did for protection from other players or to steamroll other players. When you couple this with the fact that even the best weapons and armor in the game were only a little bit better than commonly available equipment, and that you were almost guaranteed to get dry looted on a daily basis (your equipment was basically meaningless) and you had a whole group of Everquest players who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing.

Everquest was familiar to me in the sense that it was much more like D&D than Ultima was (classes/levels) but in tabletop D&D there’s really no such thing as Aggro management, usually the DM just ends up attacking the guy who’s being the most annoying, so I just ended up picking the class that I like most in D&D (ranger) and went with it. I probably made it to about lvl 13 before I ever realized that I was supposed to be grouping with people. I remember reading about the taunt skill and thinking it was the stupidest skill I’d ever heard of (Who the hell would use that?.) I didn’t even have it on my skill bar. It wasn’t until right before I stopped playing at lvl 18 that I started to realize how the group dynamic was set up and that the reason that it was taking me so long to get anything done is that I wasn’t playing the game right.

That was the last exposure I had to a class based game until WoW. Being a guy who loves the melee class I rolled a warrior, and was pretty depressed until we started to get buffed. That’s when the situation that you’re talking about arose, where now with a 30% crit chance and TUF, we absolutely destroy people, you cant spit without spraying a warrior. Now we’re staring to get nerfed (warriors, nerfed, ha! Go back in time and tell that to a warrior in January) and the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Looks like it’s time for the hunters and druids to shine now.