Yesterday I read "Do You Always Play The Same Class Archetype?" over at We Fly Spitfires (which, btw, is an awesome MMO blog - read it!). Well, I instantly knew the answer: "pretty much, yeah."

I do like to try a little of everything, but in the end, when I look back to characters I've played longterm, it's always been the same: pet classes. I prefer deep and complex pet classes rather than more simple ones where you just summon the pet and it doesn't change much.

The pet class playstyle seems to be lost on newer MMO developers. Oh sure, they're putting in classes with pets, but they're very shallow. You summon the pet, and maybe you've got the choice between a tank pet and a DPS pet. Maybe you can pick from a few skins. But that's about it. There can be a lot more to pet classes, and it is honestly a very different playstyle - different from melee/ranged DPS, tanking, healing, or anything else. It really is a separate category.

Let's go back to the beginning: Ultima Online. UO has no classes - you build your character from a decently long list of skills, assorted in any way you like. A skill cap prevents you from building a "super being." So, while you can work on any skills you want, you cannot max all of them. One of the skills is "Animal Taming." This allows you to tame certain animals and monsters and then have them as pets. Each different creature requires a certain level of the skill. So, while chickens are easy to tame, dragons not so much! Once tamed, a creature gains skills in the same way your character does, and is again subject to a skill cap. This is pretty cool: you can choose your pet, and it grows with you. Taming was also (and probably still is) the hardest skill to "GM", short for "Grandmaster", in UO. This refers to achieving the [then] max of 100.0 skill. (Now it's 120.0 if you use Power Scrolls...). It took real dedication to GM Taming. This is because you had to find creatures of the right taming requirement level (you couldn't gain skill taming trivial things), and they had to not have been previous tamed/released by other Tamers. Etiquette dictated that you tamed then killed things you were grinding skill on. But we all know what happens with etiquette in MMOs. ;) Now, it's the opposite: if you tame then release a creature it raises the skill required to tame it, so it's desirable to sometimes find things that were previous tamed. There's a whole naming scheme most tamers adopted for this... But anyway I digress. Taming is hard to GM, and I've had 3 GM Tamers in UO. :)

Everquest 1 came along, and it had 2 (3 if you count the limited Shaman pets) pet classes: Necromancer and Magician. The Necromancer summoned a skeleton pet to fight for him, and the Magician could choose Earth, Water, Air, or Fire elementals to fight for them. In the beginning, the different elementals didn't do anything different. They do now. And now there's the Beastlord class, but I'm talking Day 1 stuff. Anyway. I always liked the darker side of things, so I chose a Necromancer and played one very seriously for over 8 years. It's a limited pet class: you summon your skeleton and it fights for you. You can't customize it or anything. But, hey, it's still a pet class. This was the beginning of the "shallow" pet class.

The true Golden Age of pet classes was Star Wars Galaxies, before the "New Game Experience." SWG was another non-class-based game. You picked what skills you wanted your character to have, and there was a wide variety! You could build some truly interesting characters, to be sure. It was a true sandbox character building system, easily the best. One of the skills was Creature Handling. This allowed you to tame (or buy - more on that later!) various creatures to use as pets in your fighting. There were a huge variety of creatures you could tame, and on top of that, you could customize them a lot once you got them. You could choose what skills and abilities they had (within limits). You could control a certain number of them based on their relative power. It was awesome.

On top of that, there was another skill, Bioengineering, that allowed people to custom make pets based on DNA samples and the like. This was a very, very complex system and allowed for serious customization of pets. I never was a Bioengineer, but I bought many pets from others that were, and with the customization ability I had some truly awesome pets! Much more powerful than anything I could have found in the wild. See, SWG's resource system was such that you didn't just mine, say, "Metal Ore." You mined "Metal Ore" but it had a number of properties that could vary widely, which controlled how powerful an item made from it would be. Knowing where to find high quality (and of course, "Server Best") resources was part of being a top-tier crafter in the game... Sigh.

Now we'll discuss WoW. It has 2 true pet classes, Warlock and Hunter. Both are pretty good - you can choose tank, DPS, or balanced pets - basically. Warlock has just summons, as would make sense for the lore behind a Warlock - they summon demons. Cool. Hunter is a ranged DPS class that tames animals (and some monsters) to fight for them. Different creatures are more suited for certain roles - solo tanking, DPS, PvP, etc. And you have pet talent trees allowing you some customization of your pet. It's a pretty good pet class - not as great as SWG Creature Handling, but still at least it's not just "summon and that's it."

There are other games with pet classes, of course, but I'm just trying to lay out a spectrum. From most shallow (EQ1 Necromancer style) to most deep (SWG Creature Handling). I'll always pick up a pet class as my "main", no matter what, but I do long for a very deep pet class again.

Why have current MMO developers forgotten, or given up on, this playstyle? Sure, I know one reason: cries for balance. When you've got a character that basically has another character (the pet) or characters (if the game allows multiple pets) at their control, players of other classes cry "IMBALANCED!" It's hard to balance that, and I certainly understand that. But it can be done, and it's worth it, I think, to bring back this playstyle. I know I'm not the only one that is a devotee of the style.

Another interesting thing about players and what classes they play is that I'm starting to see that it's really rooted fairly deep in someone's personality. Yesterday I was helping my wife do some work. She's recovering from surgery, and I've been trying to do as much of her work as I can. She is feeling better and was starting to do more of the work, and I wanted her to slow down and let me do it so she wouldn't tire out, and I said that I wanted to do all of her work. She replied that she didn't want anyone to do all of her work, and my reply was basically "why not? I'd LOVE to have someone do all of mine!"

I knew right then, that aspect of both our personalities linked directly to the classes we both play in games. Her first character in EQ1 was a Magician. She liked it, but always liked the idea of a Rogue. One day she rolled a Rogue and never looked back. She does not play alts; she has one character in every game we play, and it's always a melee DPS class, and nearly always a rogue type. She wants to get in and do everything herself. I always end up a pet class: I want to have minions do my work for me!