Quote Originally Posted by Cynric View Post
...
Now the problem is, how do you stray from the concept of "basic" before you cross the line of losing the identify of what they're supposed to do in that specific role, or what's even considered out of the basic? Do we really want to over-complicate things so much that it ends up becoming more of a burden trying to balance the class, and to the point that they can't even keep up with the previous classes because of it?

The earliest example I can come up with this is WoW's paladin during classic, they'd have over 5-6 different seals that give them different combat boosts, only one can be active at a time, lasts 20 seconds ,and can be used with judgement to procure different effects (nuke damage, healing, mana restoration, snaring, etc). The problem was that it ended up being incredibly cumbersome and all but 2 seals ends up being impractical in PvE. It became so overly complex and unnessescary that they eventually ended up making the seals a 30 minute self-buff and took out a lot of the unnecessary ones. I have other examples of where some games have gone out of their way to make a character have incredibly unique mechanics, but it ends up breaking what little balance the game had, but it's straying off the topic at that point.

And with regards to OP, I've only looked at the topic a little bit, but the problem he's presented is that the classes are all the either the same or play too similarity to each other (which I'm sure you can disagree, espesically in regards to how each of the tanks work and the healers themselves). And when you start making single posts just to discredit or bash people without contributing anything, it quickly becomes a problem and really doesn't help your standpoint.