Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern
To be fair though, there was certain builds that were clearly more powerful than the others. For instance, in the early days of UO everyone was an archer, everyone that was good anyway. If you didn't run with a heavy x bow and 15-20 GH potions you weren't winning any fights.
As time progressed the classes changed, 7x tank mages were all the rage for quite a while, if you weren't running this template you would get blown the frack up.
So while UO did offer an incredible amount of options as far as customization, it wasn't completely innocent. There was a lot of cookie cutter, flavour of the month builds and there still is to this day. I think the deal with UO is that it was a lot of fun for people who didn't figure it out. As far as customization goes though, compared to current and past games, UO still had the most...
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Absolutely - almost everyone ran 7x GM mage builds pre-UOR and if we're honest with ourselves, 60-70% were Swordsmanship, 20% were Maces, 10% was Fencing. Not a ton of diversity in there (but I do think there was still some diversity).
You had some Dexers who could compete with them - It was actually good to have a mix when you were having group battles since they were the main source of disruption. I will dispute that Dexers were not totally viable, I know on my shard (pacific) there were maybe a handful of Dexers who had GM resist. That IMHO was absolutely needed in a mage world.
I actually didn't really care much for the diversity because your character could do so much with those builds. You had 64 different spells you could use as a mage, some of which were kind of useful, others useless - but in all honesty, there were at least 30-35 spells you used on a regular basis (and they weren't the DoT, or different varieties of damage / button spam you see in MMOs today).
Not to mention, when 90% of the shard is mages - some would argue that this was "true balance" - and you could assess who was the best and who was the worst based on that, how good of a duelist someone was based on that as opposed to "blah blah blah, your character is built to counter my specific build" or "you cheesed me because your character has X", which exists in a lot of MMOs today.
Sure it would have been great to have more, but at the time EA was completely incapable of balancing classes, so mostly everyone ran the same class.