Back in the long long ago, the idea of “hybrid” classes and skills sets was a big deal. Classic EverQuest, for example, borrowed from D&D ideas about classes that married ideas from different classes into one overly powerful new class, and SOE was so nervous about unintentionally creating overpowered toons that it smacked hybrids with major penalties – including an experience-gain debuff originally, if memory serves me right. If a studio tried this today, I think there’d be riots.
But I do understand why they did it; I also remember the days of Ultima Online before EA made much of an attempt to balance mages, when literally every fighter and archer took magery, resulting in a game dominated by clearly overpowered tank mages who had the best of both worlds and no reason to do otherwise. So EverQuest was definitely on to something, even if it solved it the wrong way.
Still, advances in class design in the last few decades have meant that this isn’t even a discussion anymore, outside of skill-centric MMOs. Hunters and druids and paladins are just hunters and druids, balanced before they ever get to your hands. And that’s resulted in more unique hybrid classes – right?
You tell me: What’s the most unique hybrid class in an MMO?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
