What class(es) do you tend to gravitate towards in video game rpgs?
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.
I generally lean towards classes with more mechanical complexity, so generally casters/status effect types. The gameplay loop needs to sate my ADHD, so if all I'm doing is smacking something with a sword by left clicking I'm quickly going to get bored and drop it.
Roleplaying a hyper religious zealot makes a little more sense at least in universes where gods frequently interact with mortals and grant them magic powers. Maybe you can get your powers from the God of Socialism. If you stray from the path, you get the Revisionist trait and your God calls you a until you finish your redemption quest in front of the rest of your order.
Or something. I'm just shitposting. Paladins are fun to play cuz they're like less boring fighters that also cast spells.
It's not even that i do hate all dark fantasy, i like it else i would't read Glen Cook or the 40k slop (i hate the wh fantasy books for some reason though). It's i've been tired by total takeover of the genre in last 40 years with no signs of any change. Also lack of imagination and "rozmach" (no idea of the word in english, something between momentum and epicness and scale, for example Black Company series have it perfectly balanced) in most books.
Meme classes/builds. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I've just shifted my younger "don't tell me what to do" perspective into spite for video game developers and their limitations.
I always want to do the most unorthodox thing because I usually don't vibe well with the pre-defined classes in a lot of games. I've quit MMOs because I just don't like ANY of their classes as a whole package and wish they were more modular. That's why I loved Ragnarok Online so much and have played those WoW private servers that let you pick abilities from every class.
I'll dual wield shields in Souls games, make a battle priest in games that try to force them into being healers (Ragnarok). I used heavy armor, a pistol, and a shield in Grim Dawn to essentially be the Terminator. I loved Puppetmaster, one of the least played classes, in FFXI. Blue Mage in FFXIV. Whatever the class was in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance that let you flip a coin to 50/50 kill yourself or an enemy. Tonfas (the worst weapon in the game) in Nioh.
As long as the least played class isn't that because it's so unnecessarily complicated (Feral Druid many different times in WoW, etc) I naturally gravitate toward that a lot of the time. But it's really based on vibes. If I get a cool combination of race and starting armor, I might just go with a concept, like an anti-mage or something.
Edit: I know I was supposed to hit you up to play Ragnarok sometime soon from a previous thread, but I started a Chinese class and got super busy
I usually enjoy tanks, but I am also hopelessly drawn to mechanically unusual stuff
The most fun I've had in a tabletop game was when I played an investigator in Pathfinder
I knocked out a bunch of dudes with my sap, broke down the big bad with a detailed psychological analysis and proved a bunch of goblins didn't burn down a warehouse by noticing the real culprit rode a horse (Pathfinder goblins are terrified of horses)
I've always been the sneaky rogue type, but I haven't played as many TTRPGs as I'd like. And I just can't get into most video game RPGs, but my Skyrim character is always a stealth archer with a side of magic like everybody else's Skyrim character is.
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 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.
Sorcerers et al have always spoken to me, so I beeline for those if no one else is playing them in the group. If magic were real I would be a Shantotto or a Matoya, no question. Leave me alone with my frogs and brooms, all of you are losers. In FFXIV specifically I play the dwarf/gnome race, and small wizards are only a little bit cliche, so Iike being a beefy tank. I am small and fat IRL and if I could swing an axe like that with the rage of a thousand beasts you fuckin bet I would
Why I picked up Kineticists for when my GM wants to run a pathfinder table (she actually outright banned me from "any multi-classing swashbuckler into an arcane caster" (and for the record, Sorcebuckler goes HARD), gunslingers, and eldritch knights for like three years because 'that's all you play'); Kineticist is straight up Saiyans meet Benders: the Class and no other setting I've played has something like it
NOTE, so y'all don't think I'm at a table with a tyrant: she had a really good point. I've been running games w/ her since I was still in school; and in a solid half of that time, I only reliably leaned back on two or three gameplay mechanics at any given time to a point that it was getting in the way of the character work and social scenes. Branching out into other playstyles and having to bend my mind around the differences in buildcraft and how that can make radically different characters for someone who typically builds from mechanics first, it actually did my character writing wonders.
I play whatever I'm in the mood for, don't really gravitate towards a specific play style. Although I do tend to like DOT/poison builds.
In MMOs I tend to have at least one high level tank or healer. I like being able to hold the group together. In TTRPGs I always pick my class last so I can fill in whatever the group needs.
I found the best class for the PC to be a combo of rogue skillbot with a dash of magical ability. You can usually fill in a weak melee front with party members, but oftentimes rpgs will suddenly remove you from your lockpicker/magic shit analyzer so having those skills on the one character all but guaranteed to be in the party is useful.
This is true and really annoying. It also means that you're usually stuck with whoever the Rogue companion is if you don't have those skills yourself, which you may or may not like. Baldur's Gate 3 was truly revolutionary by just letting you use the highest skills from your party members in most circumstances. But even PIllars of Eternity 2 has MC-specific checks, and checks that your other party members can contribute to if they have points in the same skills. Hacking, speech, lockpicking, and other 'social' skills are pretty much mandatory to not be locked out of significant chunks of content in some games.
Baldur's Gate 3 was truly revolutionary by just letting you use the highest skills from your party members in most circumstances.
...you what? Pathfinder: Kingmaker did that 2 years before BG3 went into early access, and I'm pretty sure owlcat weren't the first to do it either.
I swear down, D&D players claim the weirdest shit as unique or original to D&D.
Fast melee. Don't have to learn any magic system bullshit, and the game is typically designed around using melee weapons. Lots of games have slow hard-hitting weapons that are just too slow to be viable, but if it's possible I do enjoy me some caveman ungabunga hit with big stick from time to time.
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.
Something that can fight solo, but with my social skills maxxed out. Picked up this habit because of Bioware RPGs I'm sure, because I didn't want to miss dialogue options but I also didn't want the game's boss fights or sections where you don't have party members to completely screw me over. Jedi Guardian in KOTOR, Paladin in Baldur's Gate, Guns/Medicine/Speech in Fallout, etc.
In MMOs I play tank all the time every time. Why? Because the tank is inarguably the protagonist of the party. Every other player is a member of the supporting cast, following ME as I go on my epic adventure. The instant dungeon queues are nice too.
I'm a bit of a number freak so I just gravitate toward whatever lets me stack a ton of modifiers and mechanics that multiply each other and cause crazy numbers to appear on the screen. That usually means mage characters that exploit lots of status effects but also can mean warriors that use every buff effect or similar things.
My favorite Path of Exile character was a build that would stack strength and int. Strength gave life, damage multiplier, and energy shield multiplier; life was converted to energy shield; int gave energy shield multiplier; energy shield then was converted to a sword. My spell damage scaled with triple the damage of the sword. Any small tweak I made to improve the build ended up giving huge gains just because of how much it would get compounded across all those things.
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.
MMOs, give me healer, all day long. I honestly do enjoy it, but I'm also willing to give out as good as I can take. It gets easier when you learn what you're looking at, like no, DPS standing in fire, I won't heal your constant damage ticks you can avoid over the tank who can't avoid their incoming.
Solo play, if I can, social skills! Lemme talk the enemy into giving up. Lemme turn their entire army against them without firing a shot. If that's not available, some kinda Spellblade or Summoner. Gimme that mix of magic and smack you in the face, be it on my own or while my ferret companion climbs up your shirt.
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.
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)
Mostly caster classes because they're more visually interesting than martial classes. Yeah, attack animations can get pretty cool, but I don't care how many flips/spins/tricks a martial character does, they're not going to stack up with most of the stuff a caster can bust out, especially when it comes to late-game spells.
paladin, you're strong enough that you can defend yourself but also you can heal yourself/your team. other healer classes tend to be too weak to defend themselves, and strictly aggressive classes rely too much on healers for me personally to wanna play one
It totally depends on the Genre. In diablo style games I go for the kitey shooty usually bow/crossbow class. In tab targeting games its always a heal over time class. In more TTRPG inspired games I love rogues. In party based games I love whatever class lets me stack the most buffs. Thats just the crunch though.
Overall I love druidic vibes. The class fantasy of nature fighting back is too juicy for me. There is something so wholesome about murdering corrupt priests/kings with pagan power. My go to class in just about every game is a wood elf druid.
The druid class hall in WoW Legion is a perfect representation for why I love them so much. Its just this perfect lil grove and someone wants to corrupt it. Stopping them is the simplest strongest motivation for me.
You playing anything cool right now pal? i always worry about you man, you and i lived pretty similarly for awhile (fathers picking fights with us and demeaning us)
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