Through my years of mmo and rpg gaming I’ve tended to swing between the two extremes of the warrior/wizard dynamic.
Some days I just want to be a dumb tank in full armor soaking up hits and acting as a wall for squishier classes. But then there’s days where I love being a glass cannon that can kill something in 1-2 nukes but a strong breeze can kill me.
The least fun I’ve head with a class was as a healer druid in Everquest. Something so stressful about the party relying on you for heals and if you wipe it’s generally your fault. idk how people dedicate themselves to a class like that.
60% chance I pick mage (except in WoW, mage is boring and actual satan if we’re talking classic)
40% chance I pick a sword and board fighter or warrior, it ain’t much, but its honest work
i prefer DPS style classses but i will always choose the class with 2 handed swords in fantasy RPGs. i would play mages more often but i generally don’t like the ‘big glowing colorful ground markers with area of effect elemental damage attacks’ genre of magic aesthetic, it comes across as gimmicky/fictitious/unimmersive, magic should be liminal/surreal/terrifying imo. i basically kind of hate the WoW style fantasy/videogame aesthetic and genre of RPG, the only one i really even slightly enjoyed was Guild Wars 2 (because huge playable cat guys with 4 ears and 4 horns and no paid subscription)
When I was a kid, mages - or whatever hacker type equivalent if it was a scifi or near future ttepg
As an adult, gimme a big club to bonk enemies with.
I play some kind of wizard usually. The mage/rogue might be the class fantasy i aspire to most, but in most games its just less interesting than full wizard. Youd think that in a magical society more martials would learn at least a bit of magic on the side, but even ones that have the means just don’t
I tend to try and ‘explain that’ in my settings as ‘concepts of pride and honor are both a lot more prevalent and a lot more subjective. “Honor” to one warrior might mean steel and spells, the next might think the one that came before him is a mewling milksop for the one or two cantrips they’ll throw in a fight’; et cetera.
I figure the latterd get offed by the former given enough time
It requires a bit of finagling; I won’t bullshit.
Firstly, most of my fantasy settings have tangible, undeniable presences of divinity; some of which have those concepts of subjective honor and what have you as full-on domains. So you get the ones who are theologically zealous about it, but you also get the ones who are brash and loud for no real good reason.
Secondly, my settings tend to caveat that regardless of whether it’s used or not, all sapient beings have some manner of thaumaturgical current (be that arcane, divine, psionic, what have you) running through them. Even in those who don’t actively manifest it through evocations, conjurations, your typical wizard/cleric/sorcerer shit, it still winds up giving them the endurance to tank through it as a fighter or a paladin; or dexterity their way around it ala rogue or ranger-- so you wind up with a lot more of those types surviving what would typically be a very quadratic wizard anywhere else than you’d expect. (I can’t have a setting be ALL nerds whipping around Maximized Fireballs and Twinned Thunderbolts.)
EDIT: It’s just now occurring to me how much that sounds like ‘instinctive magic’-- which I very much believe would evolve into a populace that evolved any manner of thaumaturgical manipulation in their ancient pasts.
tl;dr the more brash, ignorant, and loud about ‘honor’ types are still wrong about it when their subjective sense of honor is predicated on “whether or not the foe is ‘using magic’” as the commons would call it-- they just don’t know how or why they’re wrong yet bc I have an aesthetic bias toward turn of the century steampunk/clockwork/magitek vibes; and I like leaving room for named-character innovators.
I’ve enjoyed playing high damage character of several varieties (I used to play a good amount of black mage, red mage and monk in FFXIV) but I have more fun playing tanks (I also find it more stressful unfortunately).
In single player games I tend toward melee classes, I find that if I’m playing a ranged class with enemies chasing me down I feel stressed.
In a current D&D game I’m playing a support focused cleric/sorcerer. I get very obsessive about stuff and have trouble not optimizing. I thought it would be very annoying if someone played a warrior with mighty thews and my warrior with mighty thews was just twice as good as killing guys with a sword than theirs, but nobody is mad at the mage who just makes them better at everything they were already going to do, plus I tend to play my character pretty cheerleadery anyways.
PvP: healer. Ideally a mix of healing and crowd control abilities. This what I played in Shadowbane and that awful game imprinted itself on my psyche forevermore.
PvE: ranged attacker of some kind like a ranger.
Wizard, wizard, and wizard. Sometimes I’ll be a warrior, then I’ll immediately give up and and be a wizard.
I tend to be anything that has Ice/Frost Magic. If not that, than any healer.
In typical metalhead fashion I tend to pick whatever has a dark magic aesthetic, like Necromancers and Warlocks
Warlock
I always go for gishy spellsword types
in a single player RPG I’m a basic ass heavy armor tank with as much social skill as the game allows for. in an MMO I’m basically any form of utility, I like the extra thought that goes into being a tank or healer. dps tends to have a clear correct way to hit your buttons in every encounter in the entire game and the better you are at hitting your buttons exactly that way the better a dps you are. but tank and healer can have a slightly more nuanced thought process involving risk and reward and whatnot
In mmo’s or more traditional crpgs I almost always play a tank or some kind of front line fighter, sometimes a healer. Bethesda rpgs is stealth archer.
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Tank.
I’ve always found DPS meter-chasing to be obnoxious and toxic; as long as it isn’t a very slow fight or sets off some kind of enrage timer, I’d rather have damage dealers that don’t stand in damage zones over meter-chasers that scream slurs at less enthusiastic meter-chasers.
Also, I like fighting enemies in RPGs head on rather than punching their
I’d rather have damage dealers that don’t stand in damage zones over meter-chasers that scream slurs at less enthusiastic meter-chasers.
Ah, I see you too are past tolerance for Savage statics
I’ve given up on Savage in general because I’d rather not deal with
social parasitism.Good reason, tbh. When savage parsing started getting in the way of a tabletop one of the homies was trying to keep running, I gave up the static easy as pie lmao
Very good reason.
shit is the worst and can cause a sort of socioeconomic blight the same way a Wal-Mart can devastate a community that was doing fine before it showed up.
