It’s Time. Drop the Class System.

tomofhyrule · April 17

Al_Ex_Andre wrote: »

Can the game be better with or without a class system, that's the devs who should answer this.

Well, they introduced Subclassing in 2025 as a way to loosen Class restrictions to give more freedom.

Three months later, there was a forum thread asking how Subclassing affected our game (essentially a post-mortem in all but name), a survey to explore each Class’s identity and usefulness in the absence of Subclassing, and a two-year plan to put any new Combat features on hold to first get every Class reworked one-by-one to make sure they each feel appropriately powerful as a Class unit and all three lines have skills for all three roles, not to mention a new set of passives coming soon specifically designed to double down on identity for players who do not Subclass and add enough power to make them competitive with minmaxed Subclass builds.

So it looks like the devs tried to open it up, but then pretty soon afterwards they hit the “oh [snip] go back” button hard. Reading between the lines says that they saw immediate negative results from going too open, and that reinforcing Class Identity would be healthier for the game.

ghastley · April 17

To start with, classes were the primary way of making exclusionary choices for your character. By choosing a class, you put the skill lines of the other classes out of reach, and that meant foor other classes, for a total of twelve skill lines. Then they added Necromancer, Warden and Arcanist, so now it's twenty-one excluded skill lines. (I don't understand why people still
appear to want more).

Race is similar, but there are only sets of minor passives involved there. Race could have been the primary vehicle for exclusion, but they picked class instead.

At some point, someone decided that twenty-one unavailable skill lines was too much, so sub-classing was brought in. It probably went too far in allowing two lines to be swapped out, but that's debatable. Either way, all skill lines are on the table for an existing character, which is good, but the player still has to make a choice of which to exclude. As with all compromises, not everyone is going to happy, especially those who don't understand why they can't have everything.

Classic D&D goes to the opposite extreme, with the choice of class excluding armor and weapon choices, types of spells etc. Early TES single-player games had aspects of that, but more graded. Wearing heavy armor might make you unable to cast much of a spell, for example, but didn't prevent it completely. ESO retains some biases in that direction, but it's possible to be a staff-wielding tank in light armor if you try.

So the real question here is what skills to we want to tie to, or exclude because of, other skills? Do we link armor to weapon, so Heavy armor can't use staves? Light can't use shields? Do we tone that down to making the skills weaker (which gets implemented as synergies to make it look positive)? They're currently doing the cross-skill-line synergy thing in the class overhauls, I notice.

If every player can cherry-pick without consequences, it becomes a uniform boring result, because at any time there will be a best choice. We need some sticky decisions that the player has to make, and live with, or there won't be ANY identity. Class is as good as any.

Sugram22 · April 20

ghastley wrote: »

To start with, classes were the primary way of making exclusionary choices for your character. By choosing a class, you put the skill lines of the other classes out of reach, and that meant foor other classes, for a total of twelve skill lines. Then they added Necromancer, Warden and Arcanist, so now it's twenty-one excluded skill lines. (I don't understand why people still
appear to want more).

there is nothing to understand, its simple, people want classless skills freedom like in skyrim, its possible without, there were a lot of cool spells that are missing here like spells that look like ice fire lightning thrower, ice shard

its not like u can take 1 arcanist spell and add it to ur spell list, that's what ppl want to chose their own spell/skills, if u have played morrowind oblivion skyrim, one of them or all 3 u should know

with role sys it would be possible, u have handful of staring spells/skills for ur role, so u can fulfill ur role, instead of class u chose role DPS healer or tank, its set so that it wont make u OP but certain skills/spell give advantage cause unique build, but some1 else may have advantage over ur build, thats for PVP and solo PVE, but on dungeons and trials u half to do ur role so there it doesn't matter, like it has always been