Unofficial Class Census Data for Yelinak TLP and Bertox Live

Give wizards some sick combo system that increases crit chance.

The surveys above are pointless. People are going to play a class that appeals to them. Also, someone above calling for monks to be nerfed is also pointless. Rogues could use some love, yes, but overall class balance is not going to happen.

Objectively we expect flat distributions for populations, but for the vast majority of things they aren't. Class play in EQ has never been evenly split. In 1999 I imagine the devs were open to seeing class balance that way but I don't think it took them long to see that some classes are simply more liked than others. Class power is a factor, but so too is the play style of the class.

At various points we all know Devs have got the mix wrong. Rogues sucked for years, not really seeing a power rise till POP. Monks used to suck due to weight penalties. SKs used to suck due to class penalties, race penalties, being kos, and not getting invis and FD until they were 30 or so. On TLPs rogues and wizards have been underwhelming for years, while it seems DBG's love for Monk's was unending.

But it's very hard to draw any conclusions from polls. How many are boxed? Which is the 'main'? Which classes are just buff or tradeskill bots?

I do think we find the info interesting. I just don't think DBG want to make balance decisions based on them.

Most EQ players must be crap because beastlords are the best class in the game and there's clearly a lack of wise gamers that know this.

what is class balance?
A) if class balance means all class performs well overall in general gameply aspects, then let's say for all rpg games 75% of people will pick ranger archetype over wizard archetype, then if EQ is balanced there will be 3 to 1 ratio between ranger and wizard , mot 1:1.
B) if balance strictly means every class gets the same amount of players, then where is player agency? Equity is not balance.

Balance is highly subjective & whether it exists in any meaningful degree or not is debateable.
I think the devs have never really paid player expectations an awful lot of heed over the years anyway, or if they did they never agreed with player hierarchies.

But the larger issue is whatever balance does (or did) exist on live servers is completely corrupted on TLP servers and it is actually less consistent there than it was even on live servers, and that's before you begin to drill down into how supposedly balanced classes are on a per-expansion basis.

Who is strongest in what content always was a crapshoot on live & it was just made a bigger crapshoot on TLP thanks to live game changes, there were so many that power creep messed up the early expansions so bad they had to put MoTM in to stop players face-rolling everything.

And they managed to do all that while having pretty much zero class development after EoK & not a whole lot of class development in the years preceding it.

Class Balance in EQ is largely a very bad joke.

Well said!

I think it's reasonable to think that player classes in a MMORPG should be relatively balanced with each other in terms of concentrated coolness, DPS power, and utility that bolsters desirability in groups. Of course, perfect balance is impossible to attain, but that doesn't mean that the developers should not at least try to achieve it.

Without an official committment from Darkpaw to keep classes balanced, you end up having a virtual world where players end up grativating to a few overpowered classses. This is the situation right now on most TLP servers where the majority of players choose to play enchanters and avoid playing rogues.

A class-based MMORPG such as EverQuest, where everyone is playing a few classes and rejecting most of the other classes, is not a healthy situation. It makes for a boring, homogenous, predictable experience.

In some ways, overplayed classes become overplayed because the developers create overpowered NPCs that can only be defeated by certain classes. Case in point: Planes of Power, requires most experience groups to have an enchanter that can charm mobs to use for DPS. Players adapt. They will grativate to the classes that give them the best odds. They will minimize risk for the maximum gain.

Playing no attention to class balance is also bad for loot distrubution as gear for a few classes is in high demand, while loot for unpopular classes is in low demand.

The fact that itemization via loot from killing mobs is pretty much equally distributed among plate, chain, leather and cloth classes and/or melee, priest and casters, is implied evidence that at some point the developers agreed that class balance was important or they would not have ensured that each type of loot has an equal chance of dropping for all classes.

To achieve class balance, buffing unpopular classes is a far better strategy than nerfing powerful classes. The devs in in the early years of EQ learned this the hard way. I just do not understand why the devs have shown no interest whatsoever in making some changes that would help make unpopular classes more popular. It may not be important to them, but it sure is important to us players.

Putting your head in the sand and ignoring class balance because class balance is hard or contentious is not wise. Much of the combative nature of these forums would vanish overnight if the devs made the effort to address this issue with the help of the players who know quite frankly kniow their chosen class better than any dev.

I strongly disagree. The above survey is better than no data.Publishing these results was meant to present data to let players make up their own minds and then to have a conversation about class balance.

Darkpaw has all the internal data as to how many players are playing each class. To faciliate trust and transparency, I urge them to publish that data for every server so everyone can see what classes are being played.

If you can look at that data and think that all classses are balanced, then that's your right. If you think that classes could use some balance, then that's your right as well.

Would you rather play a class-based MMORPG that has attempted to balance the classes or one that has not attempted class balance?

I know which I would choose.

Class balance in EQ is basically a pipe dream. EQ was not designed to scale. Classes don't even scale in power the same way. At a high level, melee scale with gear level and casters scale with character level via access to more powerful spells. Then you throw on something like AA, where in Luclin it was added basically because oh crap, we can't increase the level cap above 60 due to technical issues and they needed to add some character progression. Fast forward 20 years and now you have tens of thousands of these things per character that are not balanced to increase character power per AA point in the same way across classes.

Balancing EQ would mean tearing down core systems that were never designed to scale like the spell system, AAs, heroic stats (now with mod2 effects!), focus effects, making item level matter for all classes, etc and basically starting from scratch. Oh btw, there's a TLP server model where half the players want a carbon copy of 1999 and the other half treat them more as "fresh start" servers, so we actually need to scale the game from 1-120, and probably account for a potential level/stat squish that really should happen soon to keep all of the (actually meaningless because they're relative) numbers at a level where people can actually comprehend them. I wonder what the scope on that project would be, it sounds a lot to me like designing a new game from the ground up but limiting yourself to this clunker of an engine.