How would you feel if they scrapped the current "classes"?

[Aramil]

My point isnt that everything should be overpowered, but that there should be a diversity of roles. If you want to be a sword wielding mage that can tank and heal and destroy everything at range or something crazy, then obviously the game shouldn't accommodate that.

But if you want to be a sword wielding mage that enchants, enfeebles, etc., then maybe that is something that the developers should try and support.

I agree, that would be amazing, the only problem is that if you want multiple classes in a game, you need balance otherwise everyone will use the same classes. So to balance, unless you make all the classes exactly the same, you need to give weakness to balance the strength. By introducing strength and weakness, if the players can customize their character even a little(chose skill or stats for example) you just introduce the concept of "best" build(max the strength and min the weakness).

It's sad but as long as there's customization available, the community will expect everyone to use the best build.

[Aramil]

I agree, that would be amazing, the only problem is that if you want multiple classes in a game, you need balance otherwise everyone will use the same classes. So to balance, unless you make all the classes exactly the same, you need to give weakness to balance the strength. By introducing strength and weakness, if the players can customize their character even a little(chose skill or stats for example) you just introduce the concept of "best" build(max the strength and min the weakness).

It's sad but as long as there's customization available, the community will expect everyone to use the best build.

Actually I forgot to add something to my last post ^^;

There is a way to achieve what you seem to want, to let everyone play more or less as they want without having to do exactly the same thing as every other players.

That way is to have so many customizable stuff, so many choices that the amount of "best" build is so high that there's one for every kind of players. An example for this would be D&D the pen and paper rpg(not sure about D&Donline since i haven't try it). I'm using it since i haven't see any mmo offer that many possible customization. With all the books available, between the skills, classes, prestige classes, feat, items, spells, stats, etc, you could min/max(if you wanted) almost any kind of characters from single class like plain warrior, to multi classes with a ridiculous amount of prestige classes to melee/spellcaster hybrid, etc).

If they could achieve something like that it would be perfect. Well not completely since players who prefer a more simple style of gaming would probably hate it. Also I doubt it could be achieve in a mmo because it require too much balancing. For a pen and paper game it's fine since the gm can just nerf something that's too powerful, go with a compromise or whatever since he's not bound by the rules but for a mmo, the balance would need to be redone everytime something too powerful is found. So just because of the time and staff needed it would be unthinkable.