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The List: 10 Of The Most Unique Classes In MMORPGs | MMORPG.com

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  • KyleranKyleran Member LegendaryPosts: 43,508
    Nanfoodle said:

    lotharic said:

    Did chatGPT write this list?



    I found this to be one of the better thought out write ups and all classes that have shined in the games that came from. I played most of them and loved them very much.
    Found the article author's alt account. :)

    The title probably should have been more like "10 most unique classes in MMOs I've played."

    Most of us probably haven't been able to play every class in every MMORPG ever made for the past 25 years, so our "favorites" are going to be a very personal choice.

    I've never even played GW2, FFXIV, EQ, SWG so classes from them wouldn't be on my favorites list.

    DAOC Minstrel, check. Of course 10 years of EVE which didn't have classes greatly limited my experiences.

    I thought COH's Masterminds were pretty unique back in the day but most classes in games released in the past 10 years were pretty insipid...but then again I missed playing most of them.

    Besides, my favorite class in any MMORPG is "Murder Hobo", the actual build isn't so important really.

    Cheers...

    :)




    "True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde 

    "I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant

    Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm

    Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

    Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™

    "This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon






  • DigDuggyDigDuggy Member RarePosts: 641
    I think a lot of older games had more unique type characters. Shadowbane, vanguard, and the like. Today, most of the character classes seem geared to the almighty trinity. In years past, I think MMOs were less inhibited. Everything was new and so no 'establishment' protocols were in place.
    ValdheimKyleran
  • theGnadetheGnade Member UncommonPosts: 147
    I think DK in WoW is nothing special. Their gameplay is pretty shallow. They used to be something special but all the carebears cried until devs dumbed class down. Like in Wotlk you actually had to control your minion and diseases, otherwise you would ninja pull and aggro things that were not meant to be aggrod. Now the minion is on auto pilot and you just 1,2,3,3,3,2,1 your rotations.

    When it comes to WoW I think Druid is most unique class. Like how many MMORPG are out there where you can shapeshift into something and playlike that. Usually you see druid in MMORPG, it automatically mean that you can spam magic that is just nature themed. But with WoW it is on another level, you can turn yourself into a beast and do melee damage.
    Valdheim
  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
    Sometimes we need fantasy to survive reality 
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    Beyond the shadows there's always light
  • ashiru_1978ashiru_1978 Member RarePosts: 818




    Did you really register to sh*t on him because he doesn't praise the game you're a fanboy of right now?

    How is FF14 "the best MMO right now and the only one worth playing in the last 10 years"? xD xD xD

    If we are to be perfectly honest, it's just an above average game and nowadays the bar is so low that it's considered one of the better ones.

    I tried playing FF14 at least 3-4 times and each time after playing for at least 3 hours I end up uninstalling it.

    Things wrong with FF14:

    - there is no gear looted from killing mobs, everyone has the same gear and vendors barely sell anything so everyone looks exactly the same
    - there is no real loot system so you know what you're looting, you automatically get some ingredients or junk from mobs and that's it, you can't even control what you want and what to ignore
    - the way inventory works and how equipment works is needlessly confusing and redundant, it just takes extra effort
    - the quest dialogue system is trash - you have to click through single sentences of text to try and get the gist of what the NPC asks of you, better to just skip the crap and read the summary after, worst of all is to get to this part you need to get through the stupid per-sentence chat boxes and accept the quest before you can read the summary and decide if you want to do the quest or abandon it
    - there are no class trainers, you automatically learn skills by just leveling up and this is stupid and unrealistic, it breaks immersion and negates feeling of progress, you're just some magical prodigy that learns new things out of thin air
    - one character can be all classes is also BS because it also breaks immersion and feeling of progression and investing time and effort into your character
    - classes feel so homogenized and boring that it's just a pain to play
    - story feels like it doesn't even exist - you watch some confusing cutscenes that don't explain anything, then you're thrown into the starting city and you have to waste like 10-15 minutes just walking around talking to NPCs for no reason before you can actually leave town and go kill some wolves/boars to see how the game really works (and that part is boring as hell); people say the MSQ is boring, but the game gets better after that, but if the majority of the game is so boring, then I think the game has a pretty big problem on its hands
    - for a AAA game with subscription it has the graphics of something from like 2007 and has aged like milk, they may do an update for 7.0, but I've seen the changes and they are just insignificant shaders and stuff like this, I was hoping for a real overhaul, because the game looks so dull and characters skin and hair look like playdough
    - everything is separated in instanced areas and it really destroys immersion, because it also limits where you can go based on quests - you can't go outside of town when you first enter the world unless you complete the first quest, you can't even leave that area of town, it's a joke
    - for a AAA game with all the useless text it has, it has no voice acting, neither in English or Japanese for the most part of the game, which is pathetic when it tries to force so much text down your throat and in such an inconvenient way




    The old Vanilla WoW from 2004 is better for the opposite reasons:

    - you get gear loot from mobs, everyone looks different, because there is a variety of different looking gear so every character looks different
    - there is a real loot system so you see what a mob has and you can decide what to loot and what to ignore
    - inventory management is as simple and as straightforward as it can get - right click equips stuff, if you're at a vendor it sells stuff
    - quest dialogue is simple and to the point - you see an NPC has a quest, you talk to him, it tells you what they want from you in a few sentences, you see the reward you can get, you can decide if you want to take the quest or not even bother with it
    - there are class trainers and learning skills costs money so it feels immersive and you're making progress when you level up and know you have to go train, it also gives actual value to the money in the game, because they are used for different things and are balanced
    - one character can only be one class and that's perfectly fine, if you want to be another class, make another character, that's how it works, don't like it, don't play it
    - story is pretty straightforward - there is less than a minute cinematic that tells you of the conflict between the Horde and the Alliance and even if you are unfamiliar with Warcraft, you understand the gist of it in a few seconds, then you get a few seconds race intro and you're free to explore the world as you see fit, no stupid 5 minutes cinematics about nothing then idiotic quests to talk to 20 NPCs for absolutely no reason before it lets you leave town; what's more is that Vanilla WoW's story gets engaging from the start - it's simple, it works and it gets you involved in the world from the first minute, because you know what you're doing for the world
    - for its outdated 2004 cartoony graphics that aren't anything remarkable today, it looks appealing, colorful and everything is easy to identify, it has aged like wine and cheese
    - you can travel the whole world at level 1 - you can go from one end of the world to the other, nothing is stopping you, except high level mobs that can 1-shot you, not invisible walls or instanced areas
    - WoW doesn't have voice acting outside a few greetings by NPCs, and it doesn't need it, it does a pretty well job to provide a living world where even all the NPCs in a town you see are real and have an article on Wikia with some background, in FF14 you can't even click some NPCs, because they don't even exist in the database, they are just filler models to

    Another game that is much better than FF14 is LOTRO - better world building, more beautiful world, better story, better and more interesting classes, probably the best story an MMORPG could have, doesn't suffer from all of FF14's problems, it's only problems is server lag and client performance.

    After trying to play FF14 a few times and not liking it despite having watched anime since around 2007, I find it really hard to understand why people even play that game. Also I can't deny that the developers of FF14 really seem to care about their game and are trying to make it better rather than just make money out of it at the cost of ruining it like Activision is doing with Retail WoW, but it doesn't change the fact that all the things I'm looking for in an MMORPG are not there in FF14 so I still don't understand why people are playing something that is inferior to Vanilla WoW, a game 10 years older than FF14.
    ScotRemali
  • ValdheimValdheim Member RarePosts: 614
    Better get used to lists like this because in ten years from now they'll consist of classes from Lost Ark, Summoners War or Genshin Impact!

    We old MMORPG farts are a dying breed and so are unique classes it seems.

    That being said I'd also add some classes I found unique in the past excluding the obvious ones like GW Mesmer/DaoC classes that were already mentioned:


    • 'Blood Mage' was an interesting healer from Vanguard

    • All 'Enchanters' and 'Bards' from EQ/EQ2/Vanguard (why are there no more pure support classes nowadays?)

    • 'Bear Shaman' a melee Healer from Age of Conan

    • Allods Online (russian WoW) also had some really unique classes and races like a gang of three little furballs acting as one character

    • Tree of Savior while being a bad game (that had so much wasted potential) had a lot of really unique classes, I'd even go so far as to say this game is the top dog in terms of class variety and uniqueness

    ashiru_1978Adamantine
  • cheyanecheyane Member LegendaryPosts: 9,101
    Everquest Bard and Enchanter comes to mind.
    Mendel
    Chamber of Chains
  • ScotScot Member LegendaryPosts: 22,991
    As my old favourite was not mentioned, I will mention the 'off tank' perhaps best represented by the Champion of Lotro. A DPS that if the tank went down would stand in for him, hopefully giving the team enough time to bring the tank back up!

    No mention of the fact that uniqueness in character classes is going the way of the dodo, newer MMOs only want generic everyman classes suited to casual solos. Note that of the best ten selected the most recent of the MMOs on the list launched 11 years ago.
  • ScotScot Member LegendaryPosts: 22,991


    Aww it must stink to have a such a bad opinion. So mad that the best MMO right now ( and the only one worth playing in the past 10 years let's be honest) is getting top list recognition. FF14 will continue to grow & you cry more hehe ❤️
    Welcome to the forums!

    Before anyone asks, nearly everyone gets a welcome. :)
  • RaagnarzRaagnarz Member RarePosts: 577
    Not Many MMO"s have had truly unique classes. Honestly DAOC had the most imo. Come to think of it no game has ever tried to do what DAOC did with the sheer number of fairly unique classes. I could probably add 1 or 2 more at least.

    EQ 1: Enchanter or Bard.
    DAOC: Theurgist (temp pets), Animist (turrets first I've seen in MMO), Minstrel
    Vanguard: Blood Mage
    Warhammer - Squig Herder, Warrior Priest,
    Rift: Chloromancer
    GW2 Mesmer
  • KyleranKyleran Member LegendaryPosts: 43,508
    Scot said:


    Aww it must stink to have a such a bad opinion. So mad that the best MMO right now ( and the only one worth playing in the past 10 years let's be honest) is getting top list recognition. FF14 will continue to grow & you cry more hehe ❤️
    Welcome to the forums!

    Before anyone asks, nearly everyone gets a welcome. :)
    Just not always the welcome they expect.

    :)
    Scot

    "True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde 

    "I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant

    Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm

    Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

    Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™

    "This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon






  • DarkhawkeDarkhawke Member UncommonPosts: 212
    edited March 2023




    Did you really register to sh*t on him because he doesn't praise the game you're a fanboy of right now?

    How is FF14 "the best MMO right now and the only one worth playing in the last 10 years"? xD xD xD

    If we are to be perfectly honest, it's just an above average game and nowadays the bar is so low that it's considered one of the better ones.

    I tried playing FF14 at least 3-4 times and each time after playing for at least 3 hours I end up uninstalling it.

    Things wrong with FF14:

    - there is no gear looted from killing mobs, everyone has the same gear and vendors barely sell anything so everyone looks exactly the same
    - there is no real loot system so you know what you're looting, you automatically get some ingredients or junk from mobs and that's it, you can't even control what you want and what to ignore
    - the way inventory works and how equipment works is needlessly confusing and redundant, it just takes extra effort
    - the quest dialogue system is trash - you have to click through single sentences of text to try and get the gist of what the NPC asks of you, better to just skip the crap and read the summary after, worst of all is to get to this part you need to get through the stupid per-sentence chat boxes and accept the quest before you can read the summary and decide if you want to do the quest or abandon it
    - there are no class trainers, you automatically learn skills by just leveling up and this is stupid and unrealistic, it breaks immersion and negates feeling of progress, you're just some magical prodigy that learns new things out of thin air
    - one character can be all classes is also BS because it also breaks immersion and feeling of progression and investing time and effort into your character
    - classes feel so homogenized and boring that it's just a pain to play
    - story feels like it doesn't even exist - you watch some confusing cutscenes that don't explain anything, then you're thrown into the starting city and you have to waste like 10-15 minutes just walking around talking to NPCs for no reason before you can actually leave town and go kill some wolves/boars to see how the game really works (and that part is boring as hell); people say the MSQ is boring, but the game gets better after that, but if the majority of the game is so boring, then I think the game has a pretty big problem on its hands
    - for a AAA game with subscription it has the graphics of something from like 2007 and has aged like milk, they may do an update for 7.0, but I've seen the changes and they are just insignificant shaders and stuff like this, I was hoping for a real overhaul, because the game looks so dull and characters skin and hair look like playdough
    - everything is separated in instanced areas and it really destroys immersion, because it also limits where you can go based on quests - you can't go outside of town when you first enter the world unless you complete the first quest, you can't even leave that area of town, it's a joke
    - for a AAA game with all the useless text it has, it has no voice acting, neither in English or Japanese for the most part of the game, which is pathetic when it tries to force so much text down your throat and in such an inconvenient way




    The old Vanilla WoW from 2004 is better for the opposite reasons:

    - you get gear loot from mobs, everyone looks different, because there is a variety of different looking gear so every character looks different
    - there is a real loot system so you see what a mob has and you can decide what to loot and what to ignore
    - inventory management is as simple and as straightforward as it can get - right click equips stuff, if you're at a vendor it sells stuff
    - quest dialogue is simple and to the point - you see an NPC has a quest, you talk to him, it tells you what they want from you in a few sentences, you see the reward you can get, you can decide if you want to take the quest or not even bother with it
    - there are class trainers and learning skills costs money so it feels immersive and you're making progress when you level up and know you have to go train, it also gives actual value to the money in the game, because they are used for different things and are balanced
    - one character can only be one class and that's perfectly fine, if you want to be another class, make another character, that's how it works, don't like it, don't play it
    - story is pretty straightforward - there is less than a minute cinematic that tells you of the conflict between the Horde and the Alliance and even if you are unfamiliar with Warcraft, you understand the gist of it in a few seconds, then you get a few seconds race intro and you're free to explore the world as you see fit, no stupid 5 minutes cinematics about nothing then idiotic quests to talk to 20 NPCs for absolutely no reason before it lets you leave town; what's more is that Vanilla WoW's story gets engaging from the start - it's simple, it works and it gets you involved in the world from the first minute, because you know what you're doing for the world
    - for its outdated 2004 cartoony graphics that aren't anything remarkable today, it looks appealing, colorful and everything is easy to identify, it has aged like wine and cheese
    - you can travel the whole world at level 1 - you can go from one end of the world to the other, nothing is stopping you, except high level mobs that can 1-shot you, not invisible walls or instanced areas
    - WoW doesn't have voice acting outside a few greetings by NPCs, and it doesn't need it, it does a pretty well job to provide a living world where even all the NPCs in a town you see are real and have an article on Wikia with some background, in FF14 you can't even click some NPCs, because they don't even exist in the database, they are just filler models to

    Another game that is much better than FF14 is LOTRO - better world building, more beautiful world, better story, better and more interesting classes, probably the best story an MMORPG could have, doesn't suffer from all of FF14's problems, it's only problems is server lag and client performance.

    After trying to play FF14 a few times and not liking it despite having watched anime since around 2007, I find it really hard to understand why people even play that game. Also I can't deny that the developers of FF14 really seem to care about their game and are trying to make it better rather than just make money out of it at the cost of ruining it like Activision is doing with Retail WoW, but it doesn't change the fact that all the things I'm looking for in an MMORPG are not there in FF14 so I still don't understand why people are playing something that is inferior to Vanilla WoW, a game 10 years older than FF14.
    There is so much wrong with this post relative to FF14 , that it's not worth the time to respond .
  • kitaradkitarad Member LegendaryPosts: 7,919
    edited March 2023
    So many games old and new have very interesting classes but the ones that stick out for me are Everquest Bard and Druid, the Animist from Dark Age of Camelot, Engineer, Bureaucrat, Fixer and Trader from Anarchy Online. Come to think of it Anarchy Online had some really unique classes.

    Then the Red Mage from FFXI, Mastermind and Controller from City of Heroes, Herald of Xotli from Age of Conan, Disciple and Blood Mage from Vanguard, Hunter and Druid from WoW, so many more that my brain is now stuck in a loop so I will give up for now.

  • najob75najob75 Member UncommonPosts: 49
    Mesmer in GW1...cmon guys get real, that was and is best class ever.
    Adamantine
  • najob75najob75 Member UncommonPosts: 49


    It's too bad the Mesmer in GW2 is a far cry from the one in Guild Wars. The original mesmer could control the battlefield or completely shutdown a single player. It was by far one of the most interesting and powerful classes ever created.



    The Dervish from Guild Wars also had some pretty cool/unique way to build it, such as aura stacking and them removing them to do insane AOE damage and status effects.



    I loved to play arenas and just blackout, drain or interupt ...it helped me to relax and enjoy rest of the evening, while cries and whining echoed in my speakers...
  • najob75najob75 Member UncommonPosts: 49

    Darkhawke said:

    Vanguard .. pick any class.  /end



    I will never forget that game..had psionicist and i just loved it.
    olepiAdamantine
  • olepiolepi Member EpicPosts: 2,829
    najob75 said:

    Darkhawke said:

    Vanguard .. pick any class.  /end



    I will never forget that game..had psionicist and i just loved it.

    I played a fire Shaman (goblin) and loved it. A healer with a pet, that could do reasonable dmg. I also loved the necro. Kill your enemies, then carve out their body parts and install them into your pet. What's not to like with that? o:)

    ------------
    2024: 47 years on the Net.


  • NanfoodleNanfoodle Member LegendaryPosts: 10,617
    edited March 2023
    Mylan12 said:
    How could they leave out the EQ bard?
    The minstrel in DAoC while somewhat similar to the bard had its unique elements.
    The bard in Vanguard was unique also.

    While I loved my Sith Inquisitors, it was fun but not unique just a fun mage/wizard like most every game has in some form.

    Not many games have had anything resembling an EQ bard.
    I loved my DAoC Minstrel very much. A Rogue/Bard was awesome. Sneaking and taking out 1-3 players solo and when things went wrong, running faster then anyone with my speed song. If DAoC had keep upgrading their engine and the graphics I would still be playing that char =-)
    olepi
  • niie-2niie-2 Member UncommonPosts: 1
    I would toss in a few...

    Rift: Chloromancer - at the time it was added it was definitely the predecessor for current dmg to heal classes like Discipline Priest. It was ahead of its time. And it was more unique in the way it healed versus most of those newer dmg to heal classes.

    Aion: Spiritmaster - Sure, pet classes arent anythign new, but the uniqueness of Spiritmaster was different than Warlock and other pet classes of its time. Where as Warlock's pet was a minor dmg over time and solo play tank and all the dmg output was actually on the Warlock. Spiritmaster offloaded most of its gcd's to their pet of choice. FFXI's summoner was this for a while, but that job changed so much over the years to make it a discount whm, to a force in the "king" era of dragons to a NM soloer to what it is today.

    Tera: Mystic - as a healer most of its healing was done through preventing damage through debuffs and through dropped balls on the ground. It was the next evolution of wow's light well. But it was mostly through motes for others to pick up. Which honestly mostly sucked. But this is a unique list and not a "good list"

    FFXI: Geomancer - A support job with the capability to nuke things, lay down debuff and buff field all while wielding a bell? Sounds pretty unique.

    I will have to mention here, that most of the XIV jobs listed arent unique. Save for Gunbreaker. Red Mage is a knock off of XI's, Same as Dancer. Every Job in XIV is and were intended to be designed to be an "upgrade" to XI's versions of those jobs. With the exception of the XIV specific jobs, Gunbreaker, Machinist, Astrologian and Sage. (Reaper is just the other "scythe" half of xi Dark Knight. Only GNB being a unique ish class, even if it, like it is said, based on not one, but two mainline FF numbered character's in BOTH Squall and Lightning.
  • KnightFalzKnightFalz Member EpicPosts: 4,172
    Viper482 said:
    One of the worst lists I've ever seen. Shows the shallow pool of experience the author is pulling from.

    What would your list be?
  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    Notice all the DAoC love for Bards and Minstrels, but none left for the Skald.  The Skald was definitely the least of the three runner classes (speed buffs).  Still, a Skald could be very useful in certain situations.



    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • SpookmggSpookmgg Member UncommonPosts: 18
    I think the most unique classes in Final Fantasy XIV are the gathering and crafting classes. In what other game are they actually made classes and each given their own story line?
    Valdheim
  • ultimateduckultimateduck Member EpicPosts: 1,269
    I think Warhammer Onlines Warrior Priest that healed by hitting enemies with mele attacks was an amazing and well implemented class.

    I also think DAoC had a few unique classes, like the Theurgist, Warden, Vamp, Champ, Disciple and Berserker.
    Valdheim
  • ashiru_1978ashiru_1978 Member RarePosts: 818
    Darkhawke said:
    There is so much wrong with this post relative to FF14 , that it's not worth the time to respond .
    If you don't respond in some detail your response is useless. All I get from this is you disagree with me, but you don't specify why, therefore it means jack squat. Either add some detail or don't say anything, because that means sh*t. At least I put in the work to specify what I find wrong with FF14 and why I think other games do it better.
  • DigDuggyDigDuggy Member RarePosts: 641
    Valdheim said:
    Better get used to lists like this because in ten years from now they'll consist of classes from Lost Ark, Summoners War or Genshin Impact!

    We old MMORPG farts are a dying breed and so are unique classes it seems.

    That being said I'd also add some classes I found unique in the past excluding the obvious ones like GW Mesmer/DaoC classes that were already mentioned:


    • 'Blood Mage' was an interesting healer from Vanguard

    • All 'Enchanters' and 'Bards' from EQ/EQ2/Vanguard (why are there no more pure support classes nowadays?)

    • 'Bear Shaman' a melee Healer from Age of Conan

    • Allods Online (russian WoW) also had some really unique classes and races like a gang of three little furballs acting as one character

    • Tree of Savior while being a bad game (that had so much wasted potential) had a lot of really unique classes, I'd even go so far as to say this game is the top dog in terms of class variety and uniqueness

    Not at all.  Every year, we add old farts to the ranks.  They join our legions daily and they don't even know it.  However, what dying breed!!???  I'm not old enough to be thinking of the coffin yet!  Yet!

    Valdheim
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