I have been reading allot about class balance lately and I have to say I'm abit confused. All the classes come from D&D in some form or another. With that said the MMO's have taken out what made them balanced. Back when I had the original D&D books (wish I still did) there was not much to choose from. You had humans that could be a few classes, i.e. Fighter, cleric, mage, and thief (I think that's all). Then you had races like elf, that where fighter/mage. They where a fighter mage and that was that. So let’s take a look at what they did to balance them out.
First: The fighter was the best for the first few levels. They could where any armor uses and weapon, and had the most HP's. This made game play easy for them. But after 3 levels or so, they started to need help form other classes. Healing, opening chest, traps, damage to help take down a foe. So in the later levels they where not the best, but you still needed them.
Second: The mage was very weak, and could not do much of anything. At first level you could cast one spell a day. You had very few hp's. So you could do pretty much nothing at first. Now in the later levels they could take out whole groups of men in one spell. Slow to start and hard, kick ass in the end.
Third: The cleric was a nice mix, you could use armor, fight with blunt weapons that did less damage, and could heal. Now you did not have as many HP's as the fighter, and you also had to give up some of your treasure to your church. Pretty even though the levels.
Forth: The thief was the leather wearing, damage dealing, sneaking in the shadows person he has always been. You had the HP's of a mage, limits on your armor, and just had to not get hit. You could do everything nobody else could do.
Fifth: The Elf was so much better then the human ever could be, Infervision, immune to sleep/enchamnets, and could cast in armor. Lived along time and all and all just ruled.
So how did they balance out these classes? What was the key that keep it that way?
XP
It only took a thief 2000xp points to get a level.
A fighter 2500xp
A Cleric 3000xp
A Mage 4000xp
An Elf 5000xp
And it went way up from there. People progressed at different times. A thief would be level 3 before an elf hit level 2.
Now I know V:SoH will never have different xp's for classes. So let’s move on.
AD&D Comes out.
There where some adds and nice changes. It's been awhile since I have read a AD&D book, but here goes. So far the classes are pretty much staying the same, with some new additions. They also had all the races there. With that they had Race stats and ability's. Now each race could only be certain classes, and that still fits in with V:SoH. So how did they keep it balanced. Race based XP mods. EQ Used to have it, and I know they still had the Troll/Iskar race penalty when I stopped playing. Well now that V:SoH does not have any race stats, not sure about vision, this gets abit tossed out too. Hum, guess we need to move on to Third addition.
Gah, work again, I will finish this up soon. sorry
Aadwen