ETA on Advanced Class change?

Have any of you people played RO before? In that game, after you finish your first class levels (50 levels), you get to choose a second class: http://wiki.lumina-ro.com/images/0/08/Job_tree_girl.gif
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Last time I played it, Wow has three classes that can switch between all three "roles" (tank, healer, dps)

And SWTOR doesn't have such classes at the moment. When we get new classes, I'm sure some of them will be able to. But you still won't be able to switch AC, because Advanced Class is a class. It's right there, in the name. Resetting skill points is in no way even similar to changing classes.

Last time I played it, Wow has three classes that can switch between all three "roles" (tank, healer, dps) and it has dual spec (so some people can flip between healer and tank at will but they do have to switch gear in many cases) and some of those specs look and behave completely differently from the other specs (druid melee/stealth dps or druid ranged nuker or druid tank or druid heals?). I know, I know, Wow is a dead game as are most of the other MMOs that have allowed similar respecs, no one plays it/them anymore (wow's down to ~16x as many subs as this one has), etc., but those respecs have been available in Wow for many many years and it does show us that many of the fears that some people here have about the game breaking or even significantly changing for the worse with AC switching are just idiotic.

Actually they won't.. Bioware in the beta specifically said they didn't want a single class to be able to perform all 3 roles.. Making a class that can will undermine the classes that can't.. Especially the classes that are dps only..

Have any of you people played RO before? In that game, after you finish your first class levels (50 levels), you get to choose a second class: http://wiki.lumina-ro.com/images/0/08/Job_tree_girl.gif

You keep all the skills/passives you invested in during leveling your first class. The second class unlocks new skills and passive abilities. For example, both the monk and the priest start as acolytes, just like commando and vanguard start as a trooper. But while a monk is a melee fighter, the priest is, for the most part, a long range caster/healer class. The stats you should invest in and gameplay are completely different (unless you're making a melee priest).

So, the only difference we get is that we change classes after only 10 levels, rather than 50. But in that game I never saw any requests for people to be able to change from monk to priest (and getting to level 99 took months of grind).

Why is this game so much different that completely different classes should be inter-changeable. Sage/Sorcerer and Shadow/Assassin have literally nothing in common. Sage is a long range DPS caster/healer, Assassin is a stealth melee DPS/tank. They are, for all intents and purposes different classes, though they do both inherit a couple skills from their prerequisite class, the Consular/Inquisitor, and have the same signature armour. Commando/Vanguard are very in this too. Like someone said, "AC are an arbitrary distinction". Well, so are base classes. The only difference between a sage and a commando is that the sage gets their big aoe later on, and they have a larger resource pool that regenerates slower. How is that not an arbitrary distinction? :P


As I said, I hope this stays permanent, and I hope we get more branches later on. Lineage 2 had an awesome class tree, where human fighters were split into 6 classes by level 40 (1 rogue, 1 archer, 1 polearm aoe warrior, 1 single target dps duelist, 1 tank type, 1 warrior with pets), each having their own advantages and weaknesses. And that's just the human race, each race had their own classes effectively emulating our skill trees. The amount of variety you had was almost as insane as in RO, even though L2 has no stat builds/skill trees.

Since SWTOR doesn't let you allocate stats and lets you simply learn almost all of your active skills at the trainer for a small fee, I believe having more branches later on, similar to L2, and not be able to swap between them freely would add to the variety in this game (because most people only have a single "main") by having more differently specialized classes. And since we have (unlike L2) 3 distinct trees inside a class, we really don't need more than one other branch (for a total of 16 classes and 48 different playstyles).

In my opinion, variety is the best thing an MMO can have. People who only play one character regularly won't feel like they already have 20 other people that are doing exactly the same thing in their guild, and people who play multiple characters get more decisions on how to play the classes they actually like (I find snipers/gunslingers boring, but I would play two different kinds of sawbones medics), but don't have the play the exact same class twice because they want a commando and a merc.

For example, commandos at level 40 choose a second AC between an aoe specialized and a single target specialized commando. Grenadiers and machinegunners? One of them gets more aoe dps, more aoe heals, more aoe buffs. The other gets more single target DPS abilities, better full auto, the ability to heal a single target faster, single target buffs. But they both retain their basic abilities they had as a commando+trooper. The gameplay difference between the two would be miles apart, while they still had similar skills for the most part.

I also highly doubt we will get new classes -- although they *are* looking at alternate ways to add them in.

They've said they will not add in another 1-50 class story, because it is "very, very expensive" and not really worth the cost.