I loved this game almost as much as EQ. It served as a spiritual sequel to EverQuest, unlike the disappointing EQ2. It sadly had development hell though, having a blank check from Microsoft to make the next big killer MMO. Then Microsoft bailed when they had a company wide shift to focus on the Xbox 360. The game got bought by SOE who released it shortly later in a buggy unfinished state. Performance and bugs were a huge problem for people in post-WoW era.
There was an amazing game inside though, for anyone who could get past the problems (which wasn't many people). I luckily upgrade my PC so it worked well for me. The graphics were outstanding for the time and I still love the way it looks. There were a lot of areas that needed more work, but the good looking places are still the best locations and atmosphere I've experienced in a game. There is one dungeon in particular I wish I could link a video of, I will some day. The walls are made from elaborate gold murals and the stairs are marble or something. The light shines off it all and it looks incredible. At the time graphics had just made a big leap with this technology so I figured I was remembering it because of my PC upgrade. But nowadays everything has fancy lighting and textures and yet it still doesn't look as good as Vanguard did almost 20 years ago. My friends had older hardware and it ran like total shit for them, so I get why the game flopped. But still, it's an enormous game full of interesting and unique gameplay and ideas and a lot of it's awesome. Also in terms of class design, I think this game beats any other MMO or RPG.
p.s. There is a small team working on an emulator of this game by the way, so eventually it will come back.
The Bard - creating your own songs.
The best Bard ever made was in this game. So you can auto attack with your weapons, then you have a bunch of melee abilities, stabs with daggers or swords that bleed over time etc, big hits, stunning hits, etc. And then you also have a bunch of spells, magical ways to snare the enemy, root them in place, put them to sleep, silence, damage over time, etc. A deep class, lots of spells and melee abilities. Even just that would be better than probably any other MMO Bard. But in addition to this you could create your own songs.
The only games I've seen do something similar to this is Two Worlds 2 with the spell creation system, and older Elder Scrolls games that let you craft a spell. But Vanguard's Bards could create songs in a much better way. A window would appear with categories that are the components of a song. The melody, coda, bridge, embellishments, lyrics, etc. In each of these slots you could put an effect, so maybe you would have an effect that makes you invisible in the melody slot, and then in the lyrics an effect that boosts your run speed, so the perfect travel or escape song. But you can mix anything in there, so you could have a run speed song that also blasts your area with damage, and also snares any nearby enemies too. Or gives you damage reduction and healing while you levitate and blast enemies or whatever. There were several slots so you could have plenty of stuff, and you got more slots as you levelled up too, so you could create elaborate songs. There was a mana cost for each component though, and you could only sustain a certain amount of stuff in each song. So there would be "rests" that you could put into the song that took the place of a useful component, but would reduce the mana cost of the song. So you could make songs that did less varied stuff, but were stronger.
So as well as all the useful Bard spells and abilities each Bard had several custom songs for each situation. Like a travel song, boosts your run speed, makes you invisible, levitates you, lets you see invisible creatures, etc, all in one song. Then a song for fighting a big single target, it gives you some physical damage reduction, it slows the attacks of your target, damage over time, boosts your attack speed, and a few other things, all in one great offensive song. Then there would be another one like that but for fighting spell casters, instead of reducing attack speed it would drain their mana and try to stun them to interrupt their spell casting. Song for underwater breathing, a song for fighting groups of enemies to blast them with area damage, a song to heal your group for resting after fights, a song to boost magic output for when you were grouped up with mostly spell casters, a pure melee boosting song if you grouped with mostly rogues and warriors and stuff. And so on.
The Blood Mage:
Healing in games, usually you target an injured person, click a healing spell, and that's that. Some games do a better job by having heals over time, fast small heal, slow but big heal, group heal, etc. Vanguard has that too with the Cleric which is a traditional healer class, but early MMO players complained that as a healer they couldn't get involved in the combat and just stayed at the back shooting heals at health bars. They called it "whack a mole" with hp bars and it wasn't fun. Vanguard fixed this with the Disciple and Blood Mage, healer classes that got directly involved in combat at the same time. You now can target 2 things at the same time, an offensive target (an enemy), and a defensive target (yourself, a pet, a group mate etc). With the Blood Mage they could create vials of your own blood and it reduces your health by 25%, but increased healing output with bits from the blood vial. There was also a thing called your Blood Union which got weaker over time. When you did some specific attacks on enemies it would boost your Blood Union and really increase your healing output. So it felt like a Berserker class crossed with a healer. It was scary because when things got dangerous and you were worried about dying or your group was getting owned, most healers felt like running out of danger and spamming heals. But this Blood Mage would die like that, you had to leap into the fight and beat stuff up and it triggers strong heals. You could also convert your own health to mana, so your health is constantly dropping from that and from being hit by enemies. But it triggers bigger heals so it's an exciting balancing process to play.
Disciple:
This is the 'good' version of the Blood Mage. You again have 2 targets, and as you do attacks, it triggers heals on your defensive target. But there is strategy to how it works. Your big attacks use up combo points, and your smaller ones create points. So you have to do various small kung fu attacks to build up a pool of points, and then you have to choose what big effect to trigger. It could be a snaring attack, mitigate some incoming spell damage, a big attack, a crippling attack that lowers enemy strength, or a big heal, or a group heal, etc. So you have to plan ahead and if you are getting badly injured, you better use your points for useful to that situation.
Also most of these classes have stances too. Like a defensive stance would lower all your damage output but boost your mitigation and healing. Offensive would reverse that, or a balanced. And you can't change it during combat so you need to plan ahead.
The Sorcerer:
The Wizard in EverQuest was fun, but also pretty one dimensional. He had some utility like teleport, levitate, invisibility etc. But mostly it was just nuke nuke nuke nuke. So again with Vanguard they tried to improve that and again they nailed it. Lots of Magic the Gathering influence in this class design.
You still have a bunch of damage spells, but the big spells used a lot of your mana. There were also small spells but they would top up your mana. So a Sorcerer needed to be like an overseer in battles and take it it easy when everyone is just fighting some trash. Use their little mana building spells and build up a big pool of mana. Because when a big fight happens the Sorc had the big guns. If they played smart.
But also most classes got some reactive abilities too, and the Sorcerer was one of the strongest. You could identify the spells that are cast by enemies, and at first when your skill is low, it would just say, "A Treant begins to cast a spell." As you improve this skill, it would identify what that spell is. It would take a few seconds for the enemy to cast the spell, and in that time you could decide what to do about it. One option was to just Counterspell it and stop the spell entirely. But you could also choose to reflect it back to the enemy, or convert it into a beneficial spell that hits your group. And which ever decision you made, would then unlock a small chain of other spells that you could use based on what you chose. So it was very tactical, reflecting a snare or something back to the enemy might be useless, and counterspelling it might not give you anything else to do. But if you convert the spell into a beneficial spell, it might then unlock an effect that lets you cast your next big damage spell for no mana. You would be doing all this interactive stuff at the same time as you were playing a typical Wizard type character with a whole set of direct damage, area damage, snares, roots, etc.
The Shaman:
The Shaman could heal, damage, buff, etc, as is usual for Shammys. In Vanguard though you could ally yourself to a Spirit Patron at about level 15 that would forever change how the class worked. You could reset this with a quest but mostly it was a long term decision. Hayatet the Phoenix, master of fire, gave you a phoenix pet that cast powerful spells and it changed your spells to be more offensive based. Rakurr the wolf, was an offensive melee pet and it made the class a lot more melee and damage based, and I think it also gave you the ability to stealth. Tuurgin the bear Patron was a very strong pet that could tank, and it changed the class to be more of a healer, with very strong heals but also the ability to tank as well, huge mitigation and strong enough heals to keep yourself alive as well as other people.
The Druid:
The Druid was a very broad class that could do decent heals, decent direct damage, and decent damage over time, and decent buffs too. It was well made and worked very similar to EverQuest. But the difference in Vanguard is that it had a separate pool of points called Phenomena Points. All your spells used mana as normal, but you had a separate set of spells that used this Phenomena Points. They would slowly build up over time, and you would save them for dangerous situations. If you needed a really big heal, you could spend a big bunch of your vital points and do that, there was also a very powerful damage over time, very powerful direct damage, and various other stuff. It was as tactical as ever, and even moreso because these points could take an hour or more to recover again.
The Necromancer:
It has a pet, and like only the best games, you can give it instructions. "Attack my target" and "Back off" and "Wait here" stuff like that. And these commands matter because there will be enemies you need to focus and kill first, and there will be times that you want to put the enemy to sleep and can't have the pet waking it up by hitting it, so you need to spam your "Back off!" button while doing other stuff. This alone makes it a lot more exciting and a deeper class than any action RPG. As well as the pet you also have all the typical evil stuff, poisons, diseases, life drains, etc. It mostly worked like EverQuest's Necro, but again Vanguard took it a step further and lets you harvest organs from enemies you have killed, and attach it to the pet. The organ you harvest would change based on the thing you had killed, and it let you change the pet depending on what organ you would graft onto it. So you might loot a claw from a wolf and give it to your pet which would increase its melee damage and give it attacks that cause bleeding. Or you loot a heart from a giant and it makes your pet a lot stronger, etc.
Dread Knight
I don't usually like playing melee characters, but I loved this class! It is a tank although you could change your stance that made you a lot less tanky, but become a lot more damage focused. But even in tank mode you still had lots of attacks. Damage over time spells, lifetaps over time, instant lifetaps, debilitating slashes and whatnot. None of them did huge damage but they did enough and it was all while standing toe to toe with anything. My favorite spell would teleport you to directly behind the enemy and automatically attack it and drain some life. So you would be running along minding your own business, and some bastard Orc Shaman or something would nuke you from behind some trees far away. A lesser class might try to flee, but a Dread Knight instantly appears behind the Orc and starts ripping into him and drains that damage right back. It felt godly.
But the weirdest thing about this class was the Area Effect Lifetap. You would play a dozen levels or so feeling strong, taking on 1 mob no problem, then you try 2 and you took a bit of a beating but did ok. Then you would try 3 and get owned, and you learned your place, you were strong, but you were 1v2 strong not 1v3. Then suddenly you would learn this Area Effect Lifetap spell which drained a chunk of health and gave it to you, but from every enemy it hit. So you would fight your 1-3 mobs again and try your new spell out, and it did an ok lifetap but nothing special, so you left it on your hotkeys to try again sometime. Then later you get attacked and your stomach drops as several mobs come at you... You think get ready to fight but know you are gonna die like every other time you fought that many mobs. Sure enough you get torn apart in no time, but this time you click that new Area Effect Lifetap spell, and it takes a chunk of health but from all 7 enemies and gives it to you. Suddenly you are back to full health again and all 7 foes are injured, and the spell is ready to be used again just several seconds later. So this class played like no other class, everything else was built to fight 1 on 1, but this class actually felt stronger when you came up against a bunch of enemies. And weirdly, as you started killing them off, your lifetap started getting weaker so you were winning yet it started getting harder. But once you get down to 1v2 again you could start using your single target lifetaps and manage to survive the last couple of kills. For me this never got boring. I played it for over a year, and charging into a dungeon getting attacked by 7 things and everyone is like wtf noob! and you just stand there like a wall of unstoppable force handling it.
Rogue
I didn't play this very much but it was very good and clever. The whole class was based on aggro management. In case you don't know, aggro is when someone does something that annoys the enemy so much that it decides to focus on killing you and only you. You have the "aggro". So usually you want a warrior, dread knight, or paladin to have the aggro because they are beefy, and anyone else wants to have no aggro so they can do their damage without getting hit. The Vanguard Rogue is the only class I've ever seen that can increase and decrease peoples aggro. So you start by backstabbing an enemy and it pisses it off a bit but it stays fighting your Warrior buddy. Then you stab the mob with a poisoned blade which does a lot of damage, and now it is really annoyed and it starts attacking you. But now you use a deceptive attack that makes you stealth or a smoke bomb or something and the enemy can't see you well so it goes back to the tank. Then some Sorcerer blasts the mob too hard and it turns on him, you could actually stab the enemy and build up some aggro and then transfer that to the Warrior so the mob would stop attacking your squishy Sorcerer buddy and attack the Warrior instead. Then once it is set on the Warrior you engage an offensive mode that makes every attack land a critical hit and you whoop it to death before it can change target again.
It was clever and all about balancing stuff, but at the same time it had very good abilities as well. Direct damage, damage over time, abilities that would boost your parry for a while, a kick that reduces the enemy's movement, etc. A melee fighting rogue but with lots of strategy.
If you want to see the other classes, click this:
http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Classes
p.s. Besides the best classes ever made, the game did have a few other really nice ideas. Here are just a few:
There was an amazing game inside though, for anyone who could get past the problems (which wasn't many people). I luckily upgrade my PC so it worked well for me. The graphics were outstanding for the time and I still love the way it looks. There were a lot of areas that needed more work, but the good looking places are still the best locations and atmosphere I've experienced in a game. There is one dungeon in particular I wish I could link a video of, I will some day. The walls are made from elaborate gold murals and the stairs are marble or something. The light shines off it all and it looks incredible. At the time graphics had just made a big leap with this technology so I figured I was remembering it because of my PC upgrade. But nowadays everything has fancy lighting and textures and yet it still doesn't look as good as Vanguard did almost 20 years ago. My friends had older hardware and it ran like total shit for them, so I get why the game flopped. But still, it's an enormous game full of interesting and unique gameplay and ideas and a lot of it's awesome. Also in terms of class design, I think this game beats any other MMO or RPG.
p.s. There is a small team working on an emulator of this game by the way, so eventually it will come back.
The Bard - creating your own songs.
The best Bard ever made was in this game. So you can auto attack with your weapons, then you have a bunch of melee abilities, stabs with daggers or swords that bleed over time etc, big hits, stunning hits, etc. And then you also have a bunch of spells, magical ways to snare the enemy, root them in place, put them to sleep, silence, damage over time, etc. A deep class, lots of spells and melee abilities. Even just that would be better than probably any other MMO Bard. But in addition to this you could create your own songs.
The only games I've seen do something similar to this is Two Worlds 2 with the spell creation system, and older Elder Scrolls games that let you craft a spell. But Vanguard's Bards could create songs in a much better way. A window would appear with categories that are the components of a song. The melody, coda, bridge, embellishments, lyrics, etc. In each of these slots you could put an effect, so maybe you would have an effect that makes you invisible in the melody slot, and then in the lyrics an effect that boosts your run speed, so the perfect travel or escape song. But you can mix anything in there, so you could have a run speed song that also blasts your area with damage, and also snares any nearby enemies too. Or gives you damage reduction and healing while you levitate and blast enemies or whatever. There were several slots so you could have plenty of stuff, and you got more slots as you levelled up too, so you could create elaborate songs. There was a mana cost for each component though, and you could only sustain a certain amount of stuff in each song. So there would be "rests" that you could put into the song that took the place of a useful component, but would reduce the mana cost of the song. So you could make songs that did less varied stuff, but were stronger.
So as well as all the useful Bard spells and abilities each Bard had several custom songs for each situation. Like a travel song, boosts your run speed, makes you invisible, levitates you, lets you see invisible creatures, etc, all in one song. Then a song for fighting a big single target, it gives you some physical damage reduction, it slows the attacks of your target, damage over time, boosts your attack speed, and a few other things, all in one great offensive song. Then there would be another one like that but for fighting spell casters, instead of reducing attack speed it would drain their mana and try to stun them to interrupt their spell casting. Song for underwater breathing, a song for fighting groups of enemies to blast them with area damage, a song to heal your group for resting after fights, a song to boost magic output for when you were grouped up with mostly spell casters, a pure melee boosting song if you grouped with mostly rogues and warriors and stuff. And so on.
The Blood Mage:
Healing in games, usually you target an injured person, click a healing spell, and that's that. Some games do a better job by having heals over time, fast small heal, slow but big heal, group heal, etc. Vanguard has that too with the Cleric which is a traditional healer class, but early MMO players complained that as a healer they couldn't get involved in the combat and just stayed at the back shooting heals at health bars. They called it "whack a mole" with hp bars and it wasn't fun. Vanguard fixed this with the Disciple and Blood Mage, healer classes that got directly involved in combat at the same time. You now can target 2 things at the same time, an offensive target (an enemy), and a defensive target (yourself, a pet, a group mate etc). With the Blood Mage they could create vials of your own blood and it reduces your health by 25%, but increased healing output with bits from the blood vial. There was also a thing called your Blood Union which got weaker over time. When you did some specific attacks on enemies it would boost your Blood Union and really increase your healing output. So it felt like a Berserker class crossed with a healer. It was scary because when things got dangerous and you were worried about dying or your group was getting owned, most healers felt like running out of danger and spamming heals. But this Blood Mage would die like that, you had to leap into the fight and beat stuff up and it triggers strong heals. You could also convert your own health to mana, so your health is constantly dropping from that and from being hit by enemies. But it triggers bigger heals so it's an exciting balancing process to play.
Disciple:
This is the 'good' version of the Blood Mage. You again have 2 targets, and as you do attacks, it triggers heals on your defensive target. But there is strategy to how it works. Your big attacks use up combo points, and your smaller ones create points. So you have to do various small kung fu attacks to build up a pool of points, and then you have to choose what big effect to trigger. It could be a snaring attack, mitigate some incoming spell damage, a big attack, a crippling attack that lowers enemy strength, or a big heal, or a group heal, etc. So you have to plan ahead and if you are getting badly injured, you better use your points for useful to that situation.
Also most of these classes have stances too. Like a defensive stance would lower all your damage output but boost your mitigation and healing. Offensive would reverse that, or a balanced. And you can't change it during combat so you need to plan ahead.
The Sorcerer:
The Wizard in EverQuest was fun, but also pretty one dimensional. He had some utility like teleport, levitate, invisibility etc. But mostly it was just nuke nuke nuke nuke. So again with Vanguard they tried to improve that and again they nailed it. Lots of Magic the Gathering influence in this class design.
You still have a bunch of damage spells, but the big spells used a lot of your mana. There were also small spells but they would top up your mana. So a Sorcerer needed to be like an overseer in battles and take it it easy when everyone is just fighting some trash. Use their little mana building spells and build up a big pool of mana. Because when a big fight happens the Sorc had the big guns. If they played smart.
But also most classes got some reactive abilities too, and the Sorcerer was one of the strongest. You could identify the spells that are cast by enemies, and at first when your skill is low, it would just say, "A Treant begins to cast a spell." As you improve this skill, it would identify what that spell is. It would take a few seconds for the enemy to cast the spell, and in that time you could decide what to do about it. One option was to just Counterspell it and stop the spell entirely. But you could also choose to reflect it back to the enemy, or convert it into a beneficial spell that hits your group. And which ever decision you made, would then unlock a small chain of other spells that you could use based on what you chose. So it was very tactical, reflecting a snare or something back to the enemy might be useless, and counterspelling it might not give you anything else to do. But if you convert the spell into a beneficial spell, it might then unlock an effect that lets you cast your next big damage spell for no mana. You would be doing all this interactive stuff at the same time as you were playing a typical Wizard type character with a whole set of direct damage, area damage, snares, roots, etc.
The Shaman:
The Shaman could heal, damage, buff, etc, as is usual for Shammys. In Vanguard though you could ally yourself to a Spirit Patron at about level 15 that would forever change how the class worked. You could reset this with a quest but mostly it was a long term decision. Hayatet the Phoenix, master of fire, gave you a phoenix pet that cast powerful spells and it changed your spells to be more offensive based. Rakurr the wolf, was an offensive melee pet and it made the class a lot more melee and damage based, and I think it also gave you the ability to stealth. Tuurgin the bear Patron was a very strong pet that could tank, and it changed the class to be more of a healer, with very strong heals but also the ability to tank as well, huge mitigation and strong enough heals to keep yourself alive as well as other people.
The Druid:
The Druid was a very broad class that could do decent heals, decent direct damage, and decent damage over time, and decent buffs too. It was well made and worked very similar to EverQuest. But the difference in Vanguard is that it had a separate pool of points called Phenomena Points. All your spells used mana as normal, but you had a separate set of spells that used this Phenomena Points. They would slowly build up over time, and you would save them for dangerous situations. If you needed a really big heal, you could spend a big bunch of your vital points and do that, there was also a very powerful damage over time, very powerful direct damage, and various other stuff. It was as tactical as ever, and even moreso because these points could take an hour or more to recover again.
The Necromancer:
It has a pet, and like only the best games, you can give it instructions. "Attack my target" and "Back off" and "Wait here" stuff like that. And these commands matter because there will be enemies you need to focus and kill first, and there will be times that you want to put the enemy to sleep and can't have the pet waking it up by hitting it, so you need to spam your "Back off!" button while doing other stuff. This alone makes it a lot more exciting and a deeper class than any action RPG. As well as the pet you also have all the typical evil stuff, poisons, diseases, life drains, etc. It mostly worked like EverQuest's Necro, but again Vanguard took it a step further and lets you harvest organs from enemies you have killed, and attach it to the pet. The organ you harvest would change based on the thing you had killed, and it let you change the pet depending on what organ you would graft onto it. So you might loot a claw from a wolf and give it to your pet which would increase its melee damage and give it attacks that cause bleeding. Or you loot a heart from a giant and it makes your pet a lot stronger, etc.
Dread Knight
I don't usually like playing melee characters, but I loved this class! It is a tank although you could change your stance that made you a lot less tanky, but become a lot more damage focused. But even in tank mode you still had lots of attacks. Damage over time spells, lifetaps over time, instant lifetaps, debilitating slashes and whatnot. None of them did huge damage but they did enough and it was all while standing toe to toe with anything. My favorite spell would teleport you to directly behind the enemy and automatically attack it and drain some life. So you would be running along minding your own business, and some bastard Orc Shaman or something would nuke you from behind some trees far away. A lesser class might try to flee, but a Dread Knight instantly appears behind the Orc and starts ripping into him and drains that damage right back. It felt godly.
But the weirdest thing about this class was the Area Effect Lifetap. You would play a dozen levels or so feeling strong, taking on 1 mob no problem, then you try 2 and you took a bit of a beating but did ok. Then you would try 3 and get owned, and you learned your place, you were strong, but you were 1v2 strong not 1v3. Then suddenly you would learn this Area Effect Lifetap spell which drained a chunk of health and gave it to you, but from every enemy it hit. So you would fight your 1-3 mobs again and try your new spell out, and it did an ok lifetap but nothing special, so you left it on your hotkeys to try again sometime. Then later you get attacked and your stomach drops as several mobs come at you... You think get ready to fight but know you are gonna die like every other time you fought that many mobs. Sure enough you get torn apart in no time, but this time you click that new Area Effect Lifetap spell, and it takes a chunk of health but from all 7 enemies and gives it to you. Suddenly you are back to full health again and all 7 foes are injured, and the spell is ready to be used again just several seconds later. So this class played like no other class, everything else was built to fight 1 on 1, but this class actually felt stronger when you came up against a bunch of enemies. And weirdly, as you started killing them off, your lifetap started getting weaker so you were winning yet it started getting harder. But once you get down to 1v2 again you could start using your single target lifetaps and manage to survive the last couple of kills. For me this never got boring. I played it for over a year, and charging into a dungeon getting attacked by 7 things and everyone is like wtf noob! and you just stand there like a wall of unstoppable force handling it.
Rogue
I didn't play this very much but it was very good and clever. The whole class was based on aggro management. In case you don't know, aggro is when someone does something that annoys the enemy so much that it decides to focus on killing you and only you. You have the "aggro". So usually you want a warrior, dread knight, or paladin to have the aggro because they are beefy, and anyone else wants to have no aggro so they can do their damage without getting hit. The Vanguard Rogue is the only class I've ever seen that can increase and decrease peoples aggro. So you start by backstabbing an enemy and it pisses it off a bit but it stays fighting your Warrior buddy. Then you stab the mob with a poisoned blade which does a lot of damage, and now it is really annoyed and it starts attacking you. But now you use a deceptive attack that makes you stealth or a smoke bomb or something and the enemy can't see you well so it goes back to the tank. Then some Sorcerer blasts the mob too hard and it turns on him, you could actually stab the enemy and build up some aggro and then transfer that to the Warrior so the mob would stop attacking your squishy Sorcerer buddy and attack the Warrior instead. Then once it is set on the Warrior you engage an offensive mode that makes every attack land a critical hit and you whoop it to death before it can change target again.
It was clever and all about balancing stuff, but at the same time it had very good abilities as well. Direct damage, damage over time, abilities that would boost your parry for a while, a kick that reduces the enemy's movement, etc. A melee fighting rogue but with lots of strategy.
If you want to see the other classes, click this:
http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Classes
p.s. Besides the best classes ever made, the game did have a few other really nice ideas. Here are just a few:
You learn your spells from spell trainers as is usual, but there were unique enemies all over the world and some of them might use magic that isn't trained anywhere, and if you fight them for a while, you can learn the magic they use. So the person who goes straight from A to B will miss out on a lot of stuff, and people who explore and do a lot, will learn extra unique spells.
There was a Synergy system, which basically gives boosts to some spells or abilities, if you use them at the right time with another class. So instead of just using your same abilities as you usually do in the same order, one day you might group up with a Bard which you haven't done before. Now instead of starting with Lightning Lightning Fireball Lightning, you change your attacks to Poison, Poison, whatever, whatever. These might be weaker spells for you, but if you use them right after the Bard has stunned the enemy, it would trigger a big damage effect that makes it much better. And this all changes for each class, so there were dozens of different combinations you could do based on who you were playing with. Most people didn't actually do any of this because they were just used to using their normal spells as they would when they are solo, and that worked fine. But really good players would change their stuff to suit who they grouped with, and their effectiveness would be better because of it.
Diplomacy. This game boasted three "Spheres" of advancement. The main one was adventuring which was just fighting and questing and doing what everyone does in every MMO. The second one was crafting, and this was made to be so much bigger than usual that you could play 100% as a crafter. You had levels as a crafter that were separate to your adventuring levels, so you might only be a level 3 druid that has to be careful when travelling around, but find a tree to harvest some wood you could make something amazing out of it as a level 46 woodworker. The crafting was pretty good as well, a minigame let you make each item so it wasn't just putting components in a box and clicking combine which is how it works in most other games. It also meant that it couldn't be macroed, because the minigame would have mishaps and things that you had to react to. Something would overheat and you had to chuck water on it, etc. The last "sphere" was diplomacy. This was a collectible card game that you would play with NPCs in towns and it was kind of like an argument. They would argue with a card and then you would use a card that matched it. It wasn't that advanced but it was the basis of a card game and I think if they had more development time they could have made it into something as fun as Gwent or whatever. But what it achieved was actually really good. Players could travel the world and do this card game, and if they succeeded, the NPC would agree to cast a spell that buffed everyone in that region. So it encouraged people to return to the cities regularly, because if a Diplomat was there, you might get rewarded with some big buffs.
There was a Synergy system, which basically gives boosts to some spells or abilities, if you use them at the right time with another class. So instead of just using your same abilities as you usually do in the same order, one day you might group up with a Bard which you haven't done before. Now instead of starting with Lightning Lightning Fireball Lightning, you change your attacks to Poison, Poison, whatever, whatever. These might be weaker spells for you, but if you use them right after the Bard has stunned the enemy, it would trigger a big damage effect that makes it much better. And this all changes for each class, so there were dozens of different combinations you could do based on who you were playing with. Most people didn't actually do any of this because they were just used to using their normal spells as they would when they are solo, and that worked fine. But really good players would change their stuff to suit who they grouped with, and their effectiveness would be better because of it.
Diplomacy. This game boasted three "Spheres" of advancement. The main one was adventuring which was just fighting and questing and doing what everyone does in every MMO. The second one was crafting, and this was made to be so much bigger than usual that you could play 100% as a crafter. You had levels as a crafter that were separate to your adventuring levels, so you might only be a level 3 druid that has to be careful when travelling around, but find a tree to harvest some wood you could make something amazing out of it as a level 46 woodworker. The crafting was pretty good as well, a minigame let you make each item so it wasn't just putting components in a box and clicking combine which is how it works in most other games. It also meant that it couldn't be macroed, because the minigame would have mishaps and things that you had to react to. Something would overheat and you had to chuck water on it, etc. The last "sphere" was diplomacy. This was a collectible card game that you would play with NPCs in towns and it was kind of like an argument. They would argue with a card and then you would use a card that matched it. It wasn't that advanced but it was the basis of a card game and I think if they had more development time they could have made it into something as fun as Gwent or whatever. But what it achieved was actually really good. Players could travel the world and do this card game, and if they succeeded, the NPC would agree to cast a spell that buffed everyone in that region. So it encouraged people to return to the cities regularly, because if a Diplomat was there, you might get rewarded with some big buffs.
Last edited:
