A Critical Thought on Class Based RPG Design

Today's Critical Thought is on the design of class-based archetypes in RPGs. RPGS like Etrian Odyssey and the Darkest Dungeon went with a different philosophy in terms of classes, and were better off because of it.
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I'm Josh Bycer and I run the site Game-Wisdom, where I examine the art and science of games. Here on Youtube, I put out a variety of videos that consists of let's plays, examinations and more.

[Exvalcore]

You keep the 3 basic classics but give each the ability to dps or tank just in their own way.
You have barriers with a caster but armor with a knight & dodge with ranger.
You reduce damage then have def other skills/equips. then use atk abilities.

You can give up barriers & opt for damage kill faster to reduce damage / heal in knights case.
while ranger/casters already reduce damage from melee by simply kiting around opponents.
So your spd & its buffs also reduce damage so theres so many ways to sustain your class.

Knights could & absorb hp, rangers could regen, casters cast heals. All can potion.
Thus healing is a non factor just some have are better for different enemies.

The only issue is dedicated counter enemies, a enemy immune to melee or mage & such
that are at a superior advantage against a certain class but can be over came with skills.

Then your issue is picking a team of all healers or defender or atkers & if no spec'd out
to offset damage or heal or cause enough damage then you start trading off resources.
Not enough damage means you trade off play time fights take longer but you use less items. Gold Earners.
Vice Verse you do lots of damage but expend resources quite quickly which might be fine. Exp Earners.

Both are fine & make it balanced.

[pyrokamileon]

I have only played a couple RPG games thus far and I really enjoyed their story so I keep coming back to the genre. having said that I have had a hard time understanding and doing well with the RPG battle system. I just started playing the remake of final fantasy tactics and lots of what I heard is that the game is pretty easy and has a good story but I did not feel like I had a good handle on the RPG elements and statistics of it. The classes involved in the game seemed multiple and I did not think it was very clear as to why I would want one character to be one class or another. I appreciate your breakdown of the purpose of a class and I do think I understand it better now, I will get back to the game as soon as I'm able to and I will do my best to stick with it 👍🏽

[POTATO-plkt]

The original guild wars had the best class system ever IMO.
The skill tree options + multiclassing means you could be whatever you wanted in a very refined way.

My necro/hunter was the most fun I ever had playing a game.

[Catmomila]

Emulation of the 3DS with Citra is pretty good, and you can also use NTR to stream the games to your computer in a New 3DS with CFW. In any case, the capture card option is better, but it's also more costly.

[MrPangahas]

I know you have an article regarding skill trees but can you do a more in depth video about it and maybe also talk about better skill/spell creation and progression.

[arieltkotz]

Path of Exile is a great exemple of class and progression design.

[darkengine]

I have some mixed thoughts on this. Certainly if healing abilities (or supporter abilities in general like healing, buffing, resurrecting, and debuffing) have such vital utility in the game as an example, distributing them to more classes will make more viable party combinations that have the prerequisite abilities.

But I have to question why we need such support abilities in the first place. The most interesting RP systems I typically find do without them making combat swift and lethal rather than padded out so long by spamming heals and phoenix downs and so forth.

Take Diablo 2 as an example. While it's a solo RPG first in single player and a party-based multiplayer RPG second, there are no healing abilities whatsoever. There are healing potions and life leech but those are available to all classes and provided by items rather than abilities. And while there are occasional build-ruining enemies with immunities on hell difficulty, there's little beyond that to make us feel like certain party combinations are required to effectively win. If a party consists only of glass cannons and no tanks (only sorceresses and bowzons, e.g.), they can compensate by kiting more. It certainly helps to have a tank or two in the party but not a requirement as long as we can adapt our playstyles accordingly to compensate for the party's weaknesses. Same if a party consists only of tanks and no glass cannons (only barbarians and paladins, e.g.). The healer type in the holy trinity is completely absent and the remaining glass cannons and tanks are optional.

I think I generally prefer fewer classes to more but more flexibility in the attribute/skill system in exchange. When games offer a whole bunch of classes, I often feel like I have less build freedom, not more. As a blatant example, say a game splits a generalized "soldier/fighter" class into specialized "swordsman", "axeman", "spearman", "archer", "crossbowman", and "gunner" classes. In those cases, I often find the game confines me a whole lot more about what type of soldier I want to create, like it might assume a bowman always uses and excels in daggers as their melee weapon when I might want to create an archer who accepts the greater encumbrance and training cost of carrying a claymore for close range.

Actually the systems that usually give me the maximal sense of freedom to create precisely the character I want are classless as with the case of Fallout 1&2. But if we have classes, I tend to prefer fewer to more but with maximum customizability over each one.

[nathanex]

Boofer, controler, spamer(makes mini creatures)