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Needlessly long thread on this. First post is TL,DR reasoning which you can skip; Second post is the idea itself, and a third post is spoons.

TL, DR: >New gear is added granted trough quest or whatever.
>Gear is not an avatar item, nor a powerup. It's something new.
>Equipping the gear turns you into a class, the gear can only be changed in the null chamber.
>Classes have altered stats and special attributes that fit a theme or a role
>This is entirely ring independent so players can still enjoy zOMG!'s trademark freedom.

Keep replies on this thread however. I just didn't want to make a huge a** discussion-starter intro in here, but I felt it was appropriate to make one, given the nature of the guild. I get this kind of thing out of hand.





Who wants to design some classes? Base stats, just in case.

Now that's the kind of answers I love hearing. Let me just go a while back...



I don't see why this is NOT. To be specific, it's not that everyone can do everything just as better as everyone else that's a bad thing, it's the consequence: since arrow everyone can do anything as good as the next, and arrow since there is room to do everything among everyone; then arrow everyone will just pick the same set for everything, and everyone will play the same. And the game doesn't really ask for it to be otherwise.

The game is rather simplified because of it, and to be frank, I never ever saw a difference between SS, SSEB, sMOB, sMEB, sSS and sEB - The basic premise behind all of them are "get all buffs among everyone, have a healing ring on everyone and kill everything with massive AoE" where the only difference is actually whether or not people had the realization they don't have to sit to fully regain their stamina before moving, and how far they go and which checkpoints they'll stop at. 6 different names for a way to play the hardest instance and all of them only change in how people move around.
And even the monsters themselves are no help. Most monsters are designed to be able to be defeated by a single person, and bringing more people with you, instead of spawning monsters with buffed up stats or other devious tricks to deal with a multitude of people, will always solve the problem by swarming the players. Cue AoE spam as "Push to win" button, everywhere. Ripper Saws were proof of how broken even monster design was.

So... yes, I do see it as huge problem. The very gameplay itself is stale as an, actually accidental and unfortunate consequence of it, and this whole thread was a hit at the problem with a change a bit below of the roots.

Now, Red understandably, is fully against it with reasonable counter-points. I mean, it makes sense. There's current systems that can be changed instead and his older post shows exactly how wary he is of having something huge like this only bring new problems instead of solving anything. His own repository has enough threads on what to do with Ghi alone and even achieve differentiation that way - let alone the fact that the rings themselves need a re-balance even before the point of wondering whether or not players would try doing anything different.
The best answer I can get off of him is the second quote, really.

And I'll be honest with the both of you. I'm grasping at a bag of straws with this whole thing myself, I don't necessarily have a lot of faith in it. I do want to see something done with the balance. I'm not saying that I would like seeing everyone just suddenly stop doing what they do now, but it would be nice if it wasn't so effective and desirable that people just don't try doing something else once in a while.

But that's a bit wrong regardless, even if this is a tangent! Hell, I've seen the worst flaming arguments regarding this on several moba threads...

Perfect balance does not imply that all sets of the same kind are religiously the same for all situations, and you're free to pick either ring A or ring B when filling for a specific slot. It means that between the two rings, both will have the same amount of usefulness, even if in different situations, but where these situations are also enough likely to occur.

See Red Kutai's idea on attack rings that also remove CC. Now, would a ring like that be "balanced" compared to Hack? Sure it doesn't damage as much, but you can remove root off of people with it! What marks it as being balanced compared to Hack is whether you'll be finding enough root effect or not to justify the DPStamPRage drop, and even then, there's the subject of root being healed by other rings or powerups, which could make the whole thing unbalanced again.
Who would the Crew Leader pick among two people who are only different in that one ring, knowing there's quite a lot of root ahead? If there's some difficulty in the choice, then congratulations, the stuff is balanced.

(Wait, bad example... I was supposed to make rings with different roles on different situations and fell back on "single choice" again... Man I hate arguing the concept of perfect balance, I fall for it myself.)

Why not have the tutorial/introductory levels give a ring subset based on a ring set chosen as a "class" of sorts by the player in the introduction (in dialogue options, probably)? Start them with a fighting ring of the ring set (although some would have to be bent a little if we're going straight off the ring sets) and then give them a series of related rings early on in quests (while upping VG difficulty a bit for people wandering in with a few more rings slightly quicker into the game?). Use this to introduce the concept and usage of ringsets, and something (what that something is, I have no idea).

[although it would be problematic with some of the very focused ringsets we have - which are good things but don't really function as a starter set of rings very well (Adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline... why won't you die already?). hmm...]