Class Design Thinking

I've also done some basic sketching which I will fully record later. There are going to be a few things unique to this game in terms of classing and leveling. The basic class structure will be pretty flexible to allow alot of choice and variety. The general idea is you will select the following:

1) A profession. This will be the first departure from a traditional WoW style mmo. These will be very broad. For example in Wow you would select a priest or a paladin if you wanted to have a religious theme. In this game you would just select "religious". As of right now my plans for professions are:

Religious - Will contain archetypes such as priest, paladin, monk
Scholar - Will contain archetypes such as mage, elementalist
Combatant - Will contain archetypes such as warrior, thief, guradian
Nature - Will contain archetypes such as ranger, beast master, druid
Engineer - Will contain archetypes such as sapper, turret maker (haha I need a name)

2) Armor weight. This will be pretty simple. Every profession will be able to select light, medium or heavy armor. This is one area I hope to improve from other MMO's greatly. In GW2 for example, there is no real penalty for wearing heavy armor. As such heavy classes are particularly daunting in that game. The same could be said for Rift. This game much like a FPS like TF2, the bigger you are the slower you move. Additionally you will regenerate less endurance. This game will have active dodging/blocking. An easy example of how this would be balanced is in the case of a guardian/tank. If he wore heavy armor he would take 25% less damage than a medium guardian. But the medium guardian could block 2 more hits every 5 seconds.

3) Traits and abilities. Let's say you are a Scholar, you're wearing medium armor. Where do you go from here to become an elementalist? Simple you spend your traits and select skills that match your profession. You could place your skills into "earth" and gain the ability to place a block of dense earth between you and your foe or another to shake the ground. This will be the most in depth part of our class system but the most interesting. You want to be 95% elementalist but have a demon pet with you? Go for it. The plan is to balance this by increasing your damage output not through specific talents but by how much is invested in your trait group. If you want that little demon, you will have to give up 5% of the damage your earthquake will do.

More to come but having a fun rainy day here drafting and coding.