Class Balance in MMORPGs
When you talk about balance in a multiplayer game, what you’re talking about is ensuring that no entity or grouping has an inherent advantage over the other. In an unbalanced game, players will flock to the side with the advantage, making that advantage even worse in cases of team-based play, or just refuse to play the game at all.
In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, players begin the game by choosing a class and other attributes for their character: their avatar. In most MMORPGs, your class is the most defining attribute of your avatar. Your class determines what your function will be in the game. If you choose a priest archetype class for example, you know you will be supporting other players by providing enhancements and healing damage. Defining these classes and balancing them so they are all fun and interesting to play is one of the hardest parts for the game designers when developing the game.
In EverQuest, there are 16 character classes. Bard, Beastlord, Berserker, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Magician, Monk, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Shadowknight, Shaman, Warrior, and Wizard. Each one has a unique combination of abilities, although many of these abilities overlap.
Some examples of classes…
The Cleric excels at healing and curing deleterious effects in battle, as well as providing beneficial enchantments (“buffs”) that supplement a character’s natural attributes. Although there are some additional things a cleric can do, this is what he excels at.
The Wizard excels at casting spells to do direct damage in combat. The wizard has some additional tools in his toolbelt, but they are secondary to his role of “nuking” the snot out of monsters.
The warrior is the archetypical strong man, attacking monsters with his sword or other melee weapon and keeping the monsters focused on him so the other players who are not as strong can dish out damage in safety.
The rogue is a sneaky character who likes to stay out of the limelight and stab the bad guys in the kidneys when their backs are turned. The rogue can’t stand up to a lot of punishment, so he’s wily and quick to stay out of their reach.
The enchanter is a caster with control over the minds and bodies of enemies and allies alike. He can bedazzle an enemy and keep it frozen, and he can also speed up the actions of friends and slow down enemies so they hit faster and slower respectively.
Each of these classes plays differently. You can stand back and cast spells, or you can get up close and personal with monsters. You can be beefy and take a lot of punishment for your group like the warrior, or you can roguishly launch a sneak attack when their defenses are down. You can soothe wounds like a cleric or sear the flesh of your enemies with a cascade of burning elements.
With 6 or 8 classes, balancing is fairly easy to accomplish. You need people with a few different abilities to fill the different combat roles required by the game. A beefy defender and a healer are essential for traditional combat models, with other classes adding damage to make your enemies die faster before you run out of endurance or casting juice (“mana”).
The designers of EverQuest had 14 starting classes when the game was released, and added two more classes through expansions later. Paladins and Shadowknights are beefy defenders like the warrior, but they have some unique abilities that assist them in battle and make their play style different but similar to the warrior. Rangers and monks dish out fast melee damage in their own way and with unique tricks to differentiate them.
Some of these classes have overlapping qualities, but they in most cases that is not a problem. You only need one defender (“tank”) and one healer in most group encounters. Because monsters can often bring friends to the party, “crowd control” is another popular role that can be filled a few different ways. Enchanters can mesmerize these “adds”, or monks and a few other classes can use their abilities to leave the friends behind and bring the monsters (“mobs”) by themselves. Beyond tanking, healing, and crowd control, the rest of the slots in your group can be filled with whatever is available. Duplicating classes in the three primary roles is usually seen as inefficient, so a group with two clerics is virtually unheard of, while a group with two wizards will probably kill many monsters quickly.
Here comes the problem; some classes only provide mediocre functionality in all areas, while offering no unique or necessary additional functionality. That may sound vague, but let me explain with an example. Would you rather have a surgeon and two nurses removing your appendix, or three general practitioners?
In the cases of classes with too many abilities such as the druid and bard, they may have a Swiss army knife with lots of neat gadgets, but none of the gadgets is enough of a replacement for the real thing. Other players perceive this as a weakness and decline to invite these characters to groups because they are taking up the space of a potentially more efficient class. Time is valuable, so players usually want to maximize the efficiency of their play time.
Reducing the number of classes would help solve this issue, but in the case of existing games like EverQuest with balance issues, the horse is already through the gate and into the next county by now.