Not going into details of what the engine is. me and my game dev group have the issue of wherever to use preset elements in classes or allow the player to pick and mix.
For example a pick and mix class could be
Fire+Air on a warrior
and for presets
Paladin (Light,Water and Earth)
our main issues are
Presets will limit player freedom.
and Duality's will create issues such as balance and certain classes will ether be Overpowering or under powered.
I've seen a lot of MMOs do this in different ways.
-In EQ2 you pick one class and get set spells from it. You can later upgrade some with the AA tree, but overall it's fairly narrow.
-GW2 alows players to pick certain classes, and then choose how you want to play it. You have special builds you can use, which give you half of your spells that are fully customizable. This seems to be more of the middle ground. You customize what your character is within that class.
-In Archeage players can choose 3 ability lists to become whatever they choose. You then pick and choose which spells and abilities you get off those lists. This allows players to completely customize how they play, but also makes for a learning curve. It's important to note that they still have the class choosing feature in character creation, it is your first ability list, and has recommended sets that go together with names for those 'classes'. (The three I chose gave me the title 'Cleric')
Any way you want to do it can be good, it's just dependent on how well it is created. How much freedom do you want your players to have? Is it your typical MMORPG like WoW and EQ, or is it something more like Path of Exile?
Going for more the WOW and rappelz style here.
im all for open builds going for instant that pailden could be built in my mind like
Build1: Tank
Build2: Support-Tank
Build3: Spellsword
its when there things like Knight a tank class. is mixed with Air and Fire whitch are damageing elements
