I have launched this thread on several gaming forums and it was always been pots of fun as well as a brilliant way to let off some gamer angst, so here goes.
Basically, the point is to nominate whatever you think is the most overpowered, unbalanced, you-feel-bad-for-even-binding-a-key-to-it game mechanic you've ever seen. It can be a class, a weapon, a spell, anything that does something in a video game, so long as it is ridiculously overpowered and you judge yourself harshly for even thinking about using it.
For my vote, I am going to nominate a class from the game I have probably played the most in my lifetime and ironically also slag off the most often: EverQuest. The fact that I have not played the game in over 10 years and still think that this is ridiculously broken is evidence of its epic awfulness, and I'm still ashamed that I wasted so much time on that fetid pool of wank.
For those of you who wisely never played, EQ was a game that hated you. Incredibly slow pace, repetitive, virtually impossible to do anything solo, huge experience penalties for dying, not being able to get back your items on your corpse - the list goes on. The game had something like 14 very distinct classes (which is impressive and no mistake), but only about 3 or 4 of them were actually necessary. Most of all, high level raiding in this game was based around one class - the Cleric.
Mind you, the cleric is not overpowered in the sense that he can kill gods by winking at them or AoE an entire server, but he was simply way too essential to any endeavour of any consequence. En gros, the cleric had good armour but no offensive ability and no other arrows in his quiver. He wasn't even that much better of a healer than other priestly classes, really, except for one irreplaceable spell: Complete Healing. This was a spell that took 10 seconds to cast and healed, I think, 10k damage, which was more hit points than anyone had through the first few years of the game's life cycle.
Most raids were built around having a certain number of clerics and, if you didn't have enough, the raid was off. Most major boss raids involved clerics taking it in turns to cast Complete Healing on the main tank. Not hard to do, but only that one class could do it and no amount of other healers could compensate for that one mid-level spell. Basically, you could be barely competent, barely awake, barely human, criminally insane, or a total bellend, but if you were a cleric you would still get asked to every raid because of Complete Healing and resurrections, which brought a player back to his corpse and restored most of the massive amount of experience lost to death. There was a very long cleric "epic" quest, in fact, that resulted in a mace that could cast the highest rez spell for free and unlimited number of times, allowing you to bring back (relatively) quickly a raid that had been totally wiped out. This, naturally, just made the cleric even more essential.
The creators of EQ were so thick that it took them over 5 years into the game's existence to admit that Complete Healing was too integral to the game, and so they gave a watered-down version to Druids and Shaman to help balance it, though resurrections remained the province of Clerics and very powerful Paladins (Paladins being the 2nd or 3rd rarest class in the game). I stopped playing not too long after that, so I have no idea if they ever changed it, but it's something I still resent to this day, which admittedly doesn't say much good about me, I'll grant you.
Well, that felt good. Now work through your own issues - it's good for the soul.
Basically, the point is to nominate whatever you think is the most overpowered, unbalanced, you-feel-bad-for-even-binding-a-key-to-it game mechanic you've ever seen. It can be a class, a weapon, a spell, anything that does something in a video game, so long as it is ridiculously overpowered and you judge yourself harshly for even thinking about using it.
For my vote, I am going to nominate a class from the game I have probably played the most in my lifetime and ironically also slag off the most often: EverQuest. The fact that I have not played the game in over 10 years and still think that this is ridiculously broken is evidence of its epic awfulness, and I'm still ashamed that I wasted so much time on that fetid pool of wank.
For those of you who wisely never played, EQ was a game that hated you. Incredibly slow pace, repetitive, virtually impossible to do anything solo, huge experience penalties for dying, not being able to get back your items on your corpse - the list goes on. The game had something like 14 very distinct classes (which is impressive and no mistake), but only about 3 or 4 of them were actually necessary. Most of all, high level raiding in this game was based around one class - the Cleric.
Mind you, the cleric is not overpowered in the sense that he can kill gods by winking at them or AoE an entire server, but he was simply way too essential to any endeavour of any consequence. En gros, the cleric had good armour but no offensive ability and no other arrows in his quiver. He wasn't even that much better of a healer than other priestly classes, really, except for one irreplaceable spell: Complete Healing. This was a spell that took 10 seconds to cast and healed, I think, 10k damage, which was more hit points than anyone had through the first few years of the game's life cycle.
Most raids were built around having a certain number of clerics and, if you didn't have enough, the raid was off. Most major boss raids involved clerics taking it in turns to cast Complete Healing on the main tank. Not hard to do, but only that one class could do it and no amount of other healers could compensate for that one mid-level spell. Basically, you could be barely competent, barely awake, barely human, criminally insane, or a total bellend, but if you were a cleric you would still get asked to every raid because of Complete Healing and resurrections, which brought a player back to his corpse and restored most of the massive amount of experience lost to death. There was a very long cleric "epic" quest, in fact, that resulted in a mace that could cast the highest rez spell for free and unlimited number of times, allowing you to bring back (relatively) quickly a raid that had been totally wiped out. This, naturally, just made the cleric even more essential.
The creators of EQ were so thick that it took them over 5 years into the game's existence to admit that Complete Healing was too integral to the game, and so they gave a watered-down version to Druids and Shaman to help balance it, though resurrections remained the province of Clerics and very powerful Paladins (Paladins being the 2nd or 3rd rarest class in the game). I stopped playing not too long after that, so I have no idea if they ever changed it, but it's something I still resent to this day, which admittedly doesn't say much good about me, I'll grant you.
Well, that felt good. Now work through your own issues - it's good for the soul.
