The Warrior-only sub-class is in the works. It will be called Knight.

I've also begun the task of looking over all the classes (again), and what spells / skills are no longer in service (as I'm sure you noticed with the re-introduction of domination).

The end result will be that some spells will change, for better or for worse, and some may go, while old ones may return. Balance and class changes are an on-going process, and it's about that time again, so if you have any thoughts on the subject, post them here!

Brazil.

In terms of figuring out which classes are stronger than others, I think the easiest way is to see which classes are being logged on more than others. Assuming that people wish to play with the stronger classes more than the weaker classes, if there are more of a given class logged on, you can conclude that they will be stronger. Conversely, those that aren't logged on at all would probably be the weaker ones.

That said, I think the most glaring weaker classes are the priest, wizard, and ninja. You pretty much don't see any priests on, while the wizards are on mainly to make scrolls. There are some ninjas logged on occasionally though.
Considering they are supposed to be "special classes" because of the requirement of one previous remort, these classes' relative weakenessees is especially glaring.

I haven't played too much with my ninja, so I won't touch upon that. But the major issue with the wizards and priests have to do with the pain related to the time needed to memorize/pray for spells, and the ceiling in terms of number of spells that can be memorized at once.

When you compare the wizards and priests with the sorcerers and clerics, there really is no reason to play a wizard or priest. For the most part, their spell repertoire is similar. Priests do get the float spell, which is useful. Time fold is nice in theory, but priests get the spell at such a high level, and I never really noticed that big of an exp gain. Conceal alignment is a great spell, but the burden of having to memorize the spell and the inability to stack the spell in terms of duration diminishes its usefulness.

As for wizards, I think the only spell (other than making scrolls) worth mentioning is power word kill. I recall that the damage was pretty paltry, and sorcerers get chaos and fission bomb which are much cooler.

With sorcerers and clerics getting zealous regen with certain equipment, their mana is pretty much unlimited. So there really is no advantage to playing the priests and wizards. With the old rules with areas having limited mana pools, there would possibly be a potential benefit to using wizards and priests in these zones. But the mobs in the zones are either exp oriented or weak overall, so it would be easy to kill them outright, or if exping is the focus, go to another zone to exp.

While one might conclude that clerics and sorcerers are just overpowered, and the kneejerk reaction would be to nerf the classes, I don't think that would be a very popular idea. Shortly after I started playing, wizards were deemed "too powerful" and they were immediately weakened. I recall that 1/2 to 2/3 of the playerbase quitting the game as a result and doing a similar action to clerics and sorcerers may do the same.

Finally, as a long run suggestion, because castcost is a remort option, why not have mem bonus a remort option to buy. While I doubt that just that addition alone will make more people want to play the priest and wizard classes, it may be an appropriate option in conjunction with other major overhauls of the class.

But to start off with, I think that memorize times need to be reduced dramatically, as well as the memorize ceiling (# of spells that can be memorized) should be raised to put them on par with their non-memorizing counterparts.

Another way to strengthen these classes would be to make more cool equipment available to them. While it may be unfeasible to change the stats of existing equipment to accommodate this, perhaps there can be equipment in the antique shops that could be added, or it could be offered as the prize in the upcoming Thanksgiving Quest or Christmas Quest.

Finally, as an aside, why isn't there a snow mountain wizard mob?

Wow, teldra .. that was a long post!

Couple of quick bullets:

- Ninja is very awesome. A lot of people don't like the burden of the large experience to level. But a nicely and fully equipped ninja is a very fun class to play. Some people like to use resistance Psi's as their "hard mob" tank ... I'm a ninja man myself - to pretty good success (and I dont even have fancy remorts on my ninja yet!)

- You mention wizards being nerfed - I remember certain things being nerfed, but it wasn't wizard only - it would have been all magic based classes. I think we were trying to find the right balance of spell damage with the new (99 at the time?) levels. I can't remember off hand when you started up with us - if we were 99 or 65. I can say, that wizards were EXTREMELY overpowered at one point - and they made more sense than sorcs, because the mem times for the overpowered spells were almost nil.

- You do bring up some good points, points that aren't lost on Bz or myself - we're currently looking at priest and wizard specifically to see what we can do to make them a little less suck-tacular. Maybe once we come to some more comprehensive ideas, we'll throw a post out to see people's reactions...

- There is a Wizard snow mountain mob. Eriri I believe. Please bug report if there is no key for her room, or if it's not working. There was a time that we locked Eriri and Osua (the priest mob)'s rooms for good, because the flags designating wizard/priest eq weren't working correctly (if we made an item !cleric - it meant !priest also!)

Thanks very much for your input
-G

Gargs,

Thanks for the reply.

As for the feedback from the ninja - it sounds like the class is a lot of fun, so I probably should break out my ninja soon to take advantage of the class.

As for your feedback re: wizards, I had started playing when those who had gone over 65 were grandfathered to keep those levels, but those who hadn't had the level 65 limit. As for the "overpowered status," I tend to agree that they were, as I remember the word of death spell killing lots of really powerful mobs very quickly. So I would agree that the class needed some downgrading at that time (as did the cleric). I think we would both agree that in hindsight, they were weakened a bit too much.

As for the snow mountain mobs, Osua is definitely there and working; however I don't think I have ever seen Eriri. Just a note for Osua - in the room to the West of Osua, there is a note that says:

It has come to our attention that Osua wishes not to be bothered for the near
future. The mighty priest has said that he needs to pray to his gods for
enlightenment. He has used his holy will to bar his door from entry.
--Monestary Staff

That note in the room description should be purged now.

As for Eriri, there is a similar note in the room in the hallway next to Eriri. However, I can get into the room with the ectoplasmic key. However, there are only the two guards in the room.

As for another suggestion, the room across Osua's room in snow mountain says it is being reserved for Celenia the elder druid. I recall one of the imms (I think it was Brazil) saying that at one time, the admin were considering having a new druid class, but that idea was scrapped and the subclass system put in. As a side note, for the other mud that I used to play a lot, they did have a really cool druid class that allowed shape changing (similar to the polymorph spell) that was a lot of fun. But assuming that the druid class will not be born, it would be cool to have a mob there that perhaps would be a "wild card" mob that could load equipment loaded by all different classes, or alternatively equipment that could be used by multiple classes with less stringent restrictions (ie carthos loads only sorcerer equipment; maybe celenia could load some eq that could be used by all classes in the head slot, one that can be used by only spellcasters in the hand slot, etc.)

Thanks again for allowing us to give our input!