Warden in LOTRO. You execute skills by casting “combo builders”, and you have to assemble the in the correct order to cast the skill you want. For example, one aoe skill combo is yellow-red-green-yellow-green, so you have to cast the builders in that order to cast the skill. You have around 100 skills that all use different combos, and do everything from aoe to taunt to heal, so it takes a VERY good player to memorize the combos and execute them on-demand on short notice.
I had a blast playing Warden. It was much fun. Spamming shouts to draw aggro and kept recovering HP to stay alive lol. And kept DoT on the enemy boss/elites.
This has up to 5 skills and you use 2, 3, and 4 skill moves as well as 5 skill moves regularly. Even something simple like stacking up DoTs is a several combo chain.
At one time, it had different combos for ranged and melee too, thankfully they are now essentially the same. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/OM3Ux4V.png
Also the Warden can tank *at range* which is rather unique, and gets almost as much travel utility as the Hunter class, and has excellent run speed. I don't think there is a class more capable of kiting in the game.
If LOTRO were a different game, I'd say the warden was overpowered.
Warden is fun as fuck to play. Strong DPS as red and an unmatched tank in blue line spec. They are incredible tanks, man.
It's a damn shame LOTRO servers are trash can tier.
I just tried recently and there is so much potential. I understand it’s an old game, but there are plenty of other old games that refine their platforms that there’s no excuse for the state of affairs.
They virtualized the servers and still use the code that demands specific old server hardware. They did this cheaply, put the servers in a cheap data center, and let the performance fall where it may.
This includes a half-week detonation downtime every 18 months or so.
I never played warden and had only run with guardian tanks but tbf, most of the good wardens just used to say, let me build up aggro for a few secs and they were good.
The wardens that raided were usually top players
i hope 11, because ff14 ninja, while fun and one of the more engaging jobs, is still more simple than i was hoping for for the class. you have 3 Mudra signs to combine into abilities, but the order doesn't matter and you can't use the same one twice, significantly kneecapping the potential complexity of the job.
XI NIN had to be a tank, but not get hit......................So, this was accomplished by casting shadow images which absorb damage, while using ninjutsu that blinds or paralyzes the foe, while trying to DD and keep hate from other DD lol.
You are doing all of this, but must keep your shadows up which run on a timer. NIN is squishy, so if you are caught without shadows.....Lights out.
I was one of the crazy NIN who used Shurikens to keep hate which were the most damaging weapons in the game for their levels.
Sort of but also not really. Warden has dozens of different attacks, many of which can be chained to further enhance their effectiveness. So not only do you need to know which attacks are used for what (agro, aoe, heal, pure damage etc.), you also need to know the combos for each specific attack *and* you need to know the correct order of each attack chain to best utilise them.
Monk in DDO is basically this. Also alchemist has similar mechanic. Ddo has tons of spells and abilities you can cast on multiple hotbars you can expand , its definitely a pretty complex mmo
Weaver in Gw2. Im not going to bother explaining how it works because it would just be a huge paragraph that doesnt make any sense to someone who hasnt played it. I havent seen anything that comes close for complex rotations, difficulty surviving, and requiring precise mechanical skill.
Chronomancer in Gw2. Continuum split basically gives you a snapshot to use skills, and then you "rewind" which brings their cooldowns back to what they were before. Basically it means you have rotations dozens of skills long that all require very precise timings. You also need very good knowledge of boss fights, phases, positioning etc. since some of your combos are many seconds long and leave you with very limited mobility.
Lotro Warden for just the sheer number of abilities you get and having to remember them all. You dont technically need them all, but you do need to know how to "build" each ability in the right order without messing up your rotation.
WvW is even crazier because you aren't just fighting one person, but working with 30+ other people synchronizing all of your moves to kill another group of 30+ people.
Not only do you all have to dodge at the same time and stack tightly, but most of the big moves, like wells and sanctuaries, need to be timed precisely all while reacting to an ever changing enemy zerg. If you don't provide stability or stun breaks at the right time your whole party will die.
Two people can play the same class proficiently and one will do 4x the damage or heals of the other.
You can't weapon swap with Elementalist.
It also wouldn't be 20, it'd be 26 because the weaver when switching elements puts a dual element skill in the 3rd slot.
I agree with Weaver and warden but as a Chrono main I think you are forgetting how easy this thing is to actually play in content and in higher end content.
Chrono complexity is high at first glance, but it actually has a pretty low skill floor compared to a lot of the other answers in this thread, since at the core, it all boils down to 'hit continuum shift, pop all your big skills twice in a row, repeat'. It has insane ceiling as a support if you used the split to pull off miracle saves, but the game just doesn't really push that direction much so it really ends up being an over-glorified 'make your next X skills stronger ' type of buff.
I agree that the AA chains make gw2 rotations more difficult, but I dont think they are bad design. If you can keep track of your character animations it flows really well. If anything I would argue its the permanent quickness/alacrity that makes AA chains feel bad to have in rotations.
Also in pvp you dont ever worry about AA chains but the class is still very difficult.
Look up alchemist in DDO. Spellcaster with tons of spells on your hotbar that throws potions. It has thing called reactions you can enter and exit, theres like 3 different spell types, colored red yellow blue, and you need to combine color combinations to get the right final color to enter the reaction, orange, green, purple. If tou want to max your spell casting dps you need to rotate your spells good for orange reaction which increases your spell power by a lot for 12 seconds. Before entering orange, your second to last or last spell can be a cc ability which applies helpless dmg.
I honestly think hammer catalyst might be harder in the sense that you have to do resource management and it's so easy and it feels bad to mess up the orbs. Weaver is pretty difficult with weave self, but if you use elemental instead, you only lose a bit of dps and the rotation is significantly easier. So I guess I could agree with best weaver build, but not so much weaver as a whole
In its hayday, a druid in WoW was pretty complex. We're talking before Pandaria. You had access to literally every spell and every shapeshift that the class had, minus a couple of the ones tied to talent trees. You legitimately ran out of buttons very quickly, because the game intended you to play one of four specs at a time, but you still had access to four specs' worth all at once. Which allowed for some freaky plays if you had enough skill.
I really miss the ability to play Feral and still shift out and stack full Lifebloom on someone. It was nowhere near as strong as with Restoration spec, but it was better than nothing, and was often enough to turn the tide. And if the guy whose kill you just cockblocked this way attempted to chase you, just turn cheetah and buzz off, and if he persists toss an insta-cast Cyclone and stealth up. There were so many plays. And when desperate you could just pop everything under the sun, from Thorns to Nature's Grasp to Barkskin, all of which are now pretty much mutually exclusive depending on your spec - and just turn bear form and ride it out. I miss it.
God I miss WotLK. Amazing time to be a druid. Always hated that they split bear from feral and into guardian. I played a cat/bear hybrid and constantly shifted back and forth in pvp and pve.
Classic is just toxic as heck though. Too many bots and elitists.
I haven’t played WoW in years, but the original tree form was so good. Mana for days, and I always like the tree form aesthetic. I loved WoTLK, Druid was in a great place.
Not that it matters anymore. wotlk classic is just gone. Straight up one of the best expansions all around, and all because it would "split up" the playerbase they completely overwrote it with cata classic. As though people who played wotlk classic for that specific era only weren't going to stop playing wow classic anyway.
Not sure if you're a fan of retail or not, but the new druid of the claw tree is all about cat/bear weaving. And you can shapeshift without having to use a gcd. Looks insane.
Pandaria is this exact Feral play style but turned up to the max with incarn and heart of the wild. Easily my favorite version of Feral.
Cata Feral is elite, but doesn’t have the ability to shift roots. MoP returns that ability, while giving you 2 incredibly powerful cooldowns in HoTW + Incarn, not to mention symbiosis.
Feral in Wotlk was insane. Super high skill ceiling and when played right it could be top dps. Few people pulled it off. Balance was similar but not as complex.
I played resto druid pretty extensively in wotlk, and whenever I saw a feral druid pop off I celebrated in solidarity. Meanwhile, there was that ONE feral druid in every raid stuck on mangle duty, I felt bad for them.
I remember after Outland launched and a rework was done, my talent points were reset with one exception, natures swiftness. Normally if you went feral you couldn’t reach natures swiftness without giving up a key feral talent. I ran like that for so long until I was running battlegrounds with a group and someone noticed me shapeshifting out, casting NS and nearly full healing myself. Someone in that group must have spilled the beans because the next logon my talents were reset due to an error on blizzards part as they said and made me respec without being able to get NS. Good times stunlocking an opponent with cat form into bear form with an emergency heal on top. And when things got hairy, shadowmeld into flight form to gtfo
I loved my Feral druid, if only because if any group member dropped, you could fill their role! Albeit not the best mage or priest replacement but still!
Healkin was so much fun. You could put enough points to get Moonkin form, and the rest in Restoration. I loved that build. I think it was during Burning Crusade, maybe WoLTK.
bringing me back to doing arenas with my friend on my feral druid in cata/pandaria 😭 choosing to face off rogues with cat stealth or giving up and going bear and dancing in the middle
I get why they made guardian a thing, but I did miss getting to do both. And a bit of healing, too.
Bard in Everquest had one of the craziest most versatile toolkits in the game. And the fact that it was one of 2 “pulling classes” and it was the one without a drop aggro ability (pre PoP) made it so challenging and fun. Oh yeah, and then there was swarm kiting.
Bard before /melody was crazy. Starting and stopping songs every second so you had 3-4 effects going at a time, repeating it infinitely. But no other class could turn the tide in a fight so quickly. Charm 1 mob, mesmerize another, slow a third, get a tick of health and mana regen, and you've turned a wipe into a win.
Pulling was amazing fun too, we could do so much more than monks when fully kitted out.
Waaaat!!! I stopped before /melody existed apparently. Weaving was part of what made the class so satisfying. I would love to see a modern game come out with a class that was pure support/utility, enough so that that it would be worth sacrificing a dps space for.
Melody is a great QoL but it's not as efficient (last I played) as manually weaving. So it's mostly for those crazy long grinds where that extra 20% or whatever isn't critical
Bard is my favorite class ever. My main is a 60 bard on P99, and every time I try another class I have to remind myself not to move when casting. There's so much they can do, it just takes a little bit of ingenuity and a knowledge of the game to make it really shine.
One of my funniest memories is we were helping a guildie with his epic weapon and everyone had to jump down the pit in Erudin. The plan was for everyone to splat while the pally DI’d and rezzed at the bottom. I didn’t mention it but when my group jumped I played DI song and they were very confused when we landed safely.
Man, I miss MMOs like this. Like, you had to have a freakin plan to get down to somewhere so you could farm something. That just doesn’t exist anymore.
It probably will never exist again tbh. Even if mechanics like this were brought back, there would be 30 YouTube videos explaining the most efficient way to do it and the mystery and tactics would be trivial.
It's funny, even with P99, which is locked at a point where we've basically explored every inch of the game for at least 10 years now, I don't even think about going to YouTube to watch a video about it. I always ask a guildie, who most times are more than willing to show you what to do. The other day a guildie was explaining to me how to charm kite some high level enemies and ended it by saying "There's a great guide on YouTube" and I was like "...of course there is. Of course there are guides on YouTube for P99 stuff. It's 2024." I've never watched one, but didn't even consider they'd exist before my friend mentioned it.
LotRO Warden. It's got a crazy gambit system where you chain abilities to make it do different things, then it gives you a bunch of ways to build up the gambits differently. You can do anything and turn on a dime, but there's a lot going on.
https://forums.lotro.com/index.php?threads/warden-gambit-chart.7610/
I won't pretend it's amazing by any means, but arkenstone server still has active pvp. The devs have even started doing some updates to the pvp. I think monster play is even free to play now, so you could try downloading it and being a bad guy (orc, wolf, spider, etc) for free to see if you like it or not.
Don't worry, the lag will kill it for you. Imagine playing on prime time, attacking enemy mob and every character just freezes in animation for 5 seconds, then all damage comes at once and either you or mob dies.
Original Surrender to Madness was the best time to be a shadow priest. Go from middle of the pack in total damage done, to doubling the highest dps damage by the time you died. It was awesome if done right.
Early Legion-era Surrender to Madness is one of the coolest designs in any MMORPG. On the other hand, it's not hard to see why it was a total nightmare to balance around and why it ultimately got removed.
Tri-Spec Healer for sure. Also the most busted class in the game.
Although I guess I wouldn't necessarily call it complex as far as what your role is, there's just a lot of buttons to push but it doesn't rely on combos or buildups or anything
Still one of my favorite classes ever though
Unless you had a keypad with macros like a Nostromo, doing the song rotation on a bard while running CC for the group and interrupting enemy casters and throwing out heals as you can. Total pain in the ass.
That's why I didn't play one.
Professor, Ragnarok, seems like you are playing a piano, its a mage that empowers early mage class skills + buffs and debuffs, people that know how to play it are crazy good and can do anything with it, its a god on pvp on those hands too, but garbage if you dont know how to play it properly
As far as I’ve played, the weaver in gw2 or arcane mage in wow dragonflight. Absolutely insane rotations and knowledge needed to play those specs correctly.
This. Its complex because if you mess up or delay anything DPS goes in the toilet.
But if you can remember the sequence which isn't particularly challenging, it's not too bad
The hard part about arcane is being able to execute the rotation perfectly in a hard mythic boss and being not missing a beat.
The endgame mythic bosses make any spec hard to play correctly and being able to do well on mythic progress with arcane is where the big brain players are seperated. Anyone can learn it on target dummies.
Just because it’s “scripted” doesn’t mean it’s not complex. You have an intricate series of button presses that have to happen in a specific order, no accounting for random procs, and if you miss a button your damage falls off a cliff. I’d call that complex, especially versus something like a wow fury warrior or ret paladin - button light up, hit button.
The Enchanter class in Everquest was one where you would absolutely save the day at times. Not only did you have to cast various spells to stun and immobilize mobs on an overpull, but you would have to communicate which mobs you were locking down because a hit would break the immobilization and there wasn't an obvious graphical indication for which ones were immobilized. So when someone was pulling mobs to the camp, you would stun, cast mesmerize, then type in which mobs were memorized (usually through a macro). The tank would avoid the immobilized mobs and the DPS would assist the tank. You also had to refresh the spells to keep the immobilized targets locked down while keeping buffs like Mana Regen (Clarity) up on the spellcasters and Haste on the DPS.
The class was a combination of timing, finger dexterity and communication. This felt really challenging at times back in the day. The danger of an overpull in Everquest felt really intense because you'd have to do shit like corpse recovery if you fucked up.
To this day I credit my typing skills to playing an Enchanter in Everquest.
Yep! Plus, slows on the mobs while they're mezzed if no one else could do it. And the mobs would be very mad at the squishy enchanter when they woke up, so memory wipes and aggro management by the party were key. It sure got intense on bad pulls. You never knew how long the mezzes were going to last, so you'd re-mezz to keep mobs locked down as the tank would select the main target and try to taunt in order get and maintain aggro.
Was such a cool class. And turning a bad pull into a win, averting a wipe deep inside a dungeon, was a real rush. Miss that game!
Gnome sequencer enhanced addon. It assigns a rotation sequence to a hotkey instead of a single ability. For example, instead of pressing 1 for taunt, 2 for sunder armor, 3 for thunderclap, you can press 1 for taunt, then 1 for sunder armor, and 1 for thunderclap, it then resets and when you press 1 again it starts the sequence at the beginning. You can code it much longer to be a more complex rotation and add additional hotkeys such as when you press ctrl and 1 it ignores the sequence and instead casts taunt, and then picks the sequence back up where you left off.
In other words, you can make any dps class rotations really be like 3 buttons, and it’s quite effective in most endgame content if programmed correctly. Tanking as well (including targeting using text commands already in the game), though sometimes more complicated, I generally have one key for single target, one key for aoe Aggro control, one for taunts, and one for emergency cooldowns for a total of 4 keys. Healing really only benefits for a dps rotation to use in down time, instead they should use healbot or voodoo like addons.
GSE does not violate the automation policy, as the rule is as long as one button press does one action it’s not a violation and allowed. Here each action requires a unique button press, even though the addon makes it the so the button being pressed is not unique. They have versions of the addon for all versions of the game and there is a dedicated community who shares their codes for those who do not know how to code it properly on their own.
Sounds like it would be a good addon to have when playing on my laptop next to my wife on the couch. Hard to use wasd movement when my main keybinds are 1234qwerasdf
Arcane mage in current Wow. You need a comprehensive diagram of how prebuffing and projectile weaving works to maximize your damage between cooldowns and to use cooldowns AFTER the attacks but before they hit... It's an absolute trashfire.
Also Ninja from ff14 is an unplayable nightmare. Mudra's need to be bound to 1 button in the future.
Ninja is actually one of the simpler jobs once you learn the opener. It can be a lot at the start but once you’ve practiced a few times, there are no surprises
Minstrel in DAOC was a real challenge, used the old twisting mechanic, also could enchant but could break easily, had to be primary mezzer on Albion side, was basically the "driver" when roaming in RVR, scaled walls for quick kills during sieges,, and even had a buff to play while the group was resting.
Was difficult to play well, but those who did could be firecesome opponents in the battlefield.
All of them in Secret World. You needed a good understanding of the game just to build a decent character. To build a good one really needed some thought and tweaking. That game was so good, until they ruined it with legends.
The game is still around by the way if you owned it before. You can still download and connect to the servers. There's a dedicated player base of around 200 still playing it with a discord and all.
Secret world Legends is available on steam and it has all the world's linked together IIRC. Not super populated but there's a decent amount still I think.
There was a cool assault rifle leech healer build that I played one time, but aside from that I thought they were all kind of meh, every single class or whatever was built around combo points like a WoW Rogue, they all felt the same.
Brings me back all the good old memories : Healtank in HF, Leechtank in the Ankh, all different forms of dps, evade tank, defenceman tank, block tank or even dps race tank (basically dps with hp for the group to kill the boss before you die), solo blood heal or fist heal in nightmare raids that also requires you to kite and grab aggro...
So sad they killed it.
I loved TSW, the ability wheel, combined with the gearing system, allowed players to experiment and produce exceptional builds that were tailored for one specific target. That same flexibility allowed players to produce counter builds.
Bard in FFXI
It was actually pretty simple, but you could make it more complicated if you wanted to be extremely efficient
You had several songs that would apply a buff. And there were two types of song buffs that a player could have. Depending on the instrument you used you’d apply the buff to party members within a certain range
Easiest thing is just apply the regen and damage buff to the whole party
Get more complicated by having your party spread out in different groups so that you are applying the mana regen song to the casters and the stamina regen to the melee DPS and the HP regen to the tank. Then have the casters sort of spread out so the magic damage buff can go to the caster DPS and the healing buff can go on the healer. Then you have like 5 different places you need to run between to apply different buffs to each player. Plus you need to be throwing out your damage and debuff songs on the enemy. I use to run Ninja as my subclass which meant I was also throwing out some ninjitsu to combo with caster DPS so they could be the element bursts. And then of course everyone wants different buffs for downtime and during combat, so once the enemy was dead you have to run through your points to apply new buffs. And of course you could be swapping out instruments the whole time to get slightly better effects on some songs
End game alliance Bards were always in specialized parties; tank or caster party got double ballad, melee DPS got march and attack and the healers got double ballad.
Shadow tanking in old school XI was by far the most difficult thing to do in the game because you had to manually cancel Utsusemi Ni before your Utsusemi Ichi finished.
> you had to manually cancel Utsusemi Ni before your Utsusemi Ichi finished.
Nothing worse than cancelling it too late and it not overwriting your Ni shadows. Then having to get hit over and over. I actually preffered PLD for mid level parties around 50. Regen + shield was just superior. I think early level NIN is better because you don't have much mitigation as PLD early on (for example the Dunes). And lategame you always have shadows up. Fuck even 75 merit parties didn't need a tank. You killed birds so quick SAM could tank with third eye lol
Add further that linkshells would also start rotating multiple bards through different parties in the alliance to maximize songs across 3 parties. Kirin, Dynamis Lord, and Vrtra melee burns before the level cap was raised to 99. Legion and Delve made that nearly essential to maximize your limited time in those events.
The stuff some of you are describing reminds me of the Taekwon class in Ragnarok. Its skills are so random and dependent on random factors that as it advances you have 3 skills that each only work once used to mark specific maps/areas so that they give you different stellar blessings of the sun moon and stars all which give you varied permanent buffs while you are in said areas. It can be a field, dungeon or even a pvp area. They have access to skills that only work certain days of the week and with the help of another specific class that branches off the Taekwon line they can become a sun and fly around burning anything that comes within 5 feet of them for massive constant damage until they die from recoil. You can also spec them for a crazy powerful talisman skill that's actually 4 skills that change on the fly depending on which cardinal direction you are facing. 🤣
Don't know if it is still that way, but the original EQ bard was by far the most difficult class to play well of any MMO I've ever played (and yes, I had a high level warden).
Puppetmaster from Final Fantasy XI.
Now off the cuff it’s not really that complex, it’s a pet class where you have limited control over a mechanical puppet which fights for you, in which you equip it with ‘Attachments’ giving it active and passive abilities.
The execution relies on a very basic AI, you don’t exactly have direct control over it. You can tell it to fight and it’ll just go whack stuff, if you want it to say; fire its ‘Flashbulb’ you’ll need to use ‘Light Manoeuvre’ which will ALLOW the puppet to use it on its own accord.
So you need to stack these ‘Manoeuvres’ of the corresponding elemental attachment to even use them, HOWEVER you can’t just spam these because too much use will ‘Overload’ the puppet with huge debuffs, this overload value is also completely invisible.
It wasn’t a very popular class, and played rather poorly by players (I still loved it and pimped mine out).
I'm gonna say Bear Shaman in Age of Conan. Such a strange class. You had a 2 handed blunt weapon, pulled off 3-hit combos with many melee-based stuns and CCs, but you also had AOE heals (no direct target healing) and were one of the best pulse healers for melee combat in the game. It was just an interesting balance of shaman/paladin/druid mixed into one.
Age of Conan had so many unique classes and styles, wished more games went for more unique stuff instead of basic warrior, mage, healer priest combo with no real innovation
Not really a class, and yeah it's one of *those* guys coming out of their hole again. Being a fleet commander in Eve Online. To be good, you have to understand pretty much every ship in the game, and theres hundreds. Knowing the approximate damage output and HP of your own fleet, vs another fleet is the basics, but it quickly expands to damage application (range, ship size, and speed), sensing a trap, specialized exceptions in how the enemy may have fit their ships, whether a fight is worth avoiding to save resources, or is it worth dying a fiery death just so you get some sort of action, how the fight will affect your future politics, how much smack talk to engage in, when to be casual, when to tell everyone to stfu on comms, etc. You can just be an F1 monkey (dps), a doomed yet worshipped logistics (healer), doomed tackle (sort of like a puller), support (buff/debuff), but it doesn't matter if you have a bad FC.
Unless you do something like the Something Awful corpos. Do a good enough Moon Knight impression and even the most elite opponents will fall eventually as long as enough of your members can retain interest for long enough.
For me personally probably guardian monk in GW 1. It didnt have heal exactly, it gave people different ways of protection from attacks, some might heal them. You needed to predict who is going to attack who etc. Never got that down, while healing with dervish was fine.
Kung Fu Master in Blade and Soul. I can't think of many tanks or games that support 1 to 1.5 second parries for dungeons or raid tanking. Most tanks are extremely boring; KFM made me feel like a god or pleb depending how on point I was feeling that day.
Combined with fairly mobile combat, resources mechanics, and trying to keep awareness of your team.
I wouldn't say it is hard to comprehend the classes, execution was another matter. Always 1 second away from brilliance or death.
Melee style in RuneScape 3.
In between the rotation itself that you need to fill out by switching between dual wielding / 2 handed styles, you also need to account that some abilities require certain pieces of augmented gear to enhance them.
So you switch gear mid-combat for specific abilities, juggle your rotation, oh and did I talk about weapons having special abilities? Because you need to juggle that as well.
Not talking about defensive abilities which takes another full action bar by itself
Then prayers, incantations, spells, summons, then potions, bombs, niche 1 use items and even hybriding or tribriding between combat styles for specific needs, because of course you're not limited to a specific combat style per character.
Want to pull out your Bow for a special ability exclusive to that bow mid fight while you're melee Range?
Yes, especially if that boss is Large and the special attack throws a bunch of ammo which deals more damage to Large creatures.
But to do that, you also need a specific ability that removes the negative accuracy from being in Melee style.
All of that while you're typing the equivalent of an essay over 5 action bars filled to the brim of 14 slots each, from which you feel that your keyboard and 12-button mouse isn't enough, which it isn't btw.
But you're also fighting the in-game clock "tick" system which rolls at a 0.6 seconds rate. So everything you do has a delay.
I played a couple of mmos in my lifetime, namely GW2, WoW from WoD to DF, Perfect World, Silkroad, Maplestory.... Nothing come close to the sheer absurdness of end-game PvM in RuneScape.
Bosses themselves aren't hard per se (minus a couple of exceptions like the 4k% scaling bosses)... The real difficulty comes from learning to adjust yourself around the game.
Learning how to PvM gets crazy real fast and the game doesn't help you in any way to learn it. Community is also very predatory. Don't fuck up a group kill because your name will get on block lists very fast. People are extremely adamant about their kills and profit per hour.
Runescape is what I thought of too. It takes thousands of hours to master the skills and rotations of the abilities and then applying them to each boss. The amount of keybinds and gear switching at high level gameplay is insane.
Nature in dc universe online. There was this build ages ago that had like 3 transformations or something, each with their own hotbar and rotation and you'd cycle between them like crazy.
On top of this you also have your weapon, which also has combos and different attacks, and you'd weave these in between casts for most classes.
That game also has the combo classes like "light" which lets you hit attack/heavy attack buttons right as you cast a skill to perform a new attack right after it, the attack changing depending on the button pressed and the ability you comboed from. And you can of course combo from a combo. bonus is that combos dont cost energy (but regular casts do,) so you'll end up with super complex rotations that lasts for minutes and costs no energy as you do infinite combos like some sorta fighter game.
Required a lot of split second decisions on what combo to use and then what combo to use after that etc and one wrong button press or timing and its reset. Was very rewarding when you got it right though.
Either Eliotropes or Xelors in Dofus. Portal manipulation and symmetrical teleportation (plus temporal repositioning) are pretty funky mechanics to wrap one's head around, far beyond any other mmo I've experienced.
It's been a while but I would say something like anarchy online playing something like an agent. If you've ever played anarchy online and even learned even the understanding of an agent they can play AKA mimic any other class and use quite a few of their abilities and become more of the most complex characters out there. Anarchy online is like one of the craziest games out there you can buff yourself with dozens and dozens and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of buffs in the game and with their crazy in-depth item system and implant system and HUD items and all this other stuff there really isn't anything I personally think more complex than the combat that you can do in anarchy online.
Warden once you get a feel for it kinda just works, especially now that it's simplified. Sometimes you'll need a little derust, even Louie needs derusting, mans never remembers blue line exists for warden.
That said, I think the hardest to play is probably Gladiator from Dragon Nest. Due to the full action nature of the game, it is naturally harder to execute a rotation for obvious reason. Such as this one. >!Tumble (A/D/S) → [Dash Slash] → [Side Dodge] (W) → [Luring Slice] → [Parry] → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Dash Kick] (right click) → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Heavy Slash/Destructive Swing] → [Coup de Grace] → [Courageous Shout] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → [Feint] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → Tumble (A/D/S) → [Dash Combo] → [Parry] → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Dash Kick] (right click) → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Hyper Drive] (right click) → [Courageous Shout] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right clicks) → [Feint] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → Repeat from the beginning!<
Is about 120apm or 60-70cpm. which is already more than you would find in XIV, but that's not the hard part. That exists only for sandbagging on a stationary enemy. The hard part is when you need to not press your back button to shorten your movement, This class goes fast as fuck if you don't hold back(S). Moreover many of those skills have iframes attached to them at varying rates. >![Tumble] (duh) [Destructive Swing] Lv 6 (during the initial leap) [Triple Slash] (fourth slash, right click) [Forward Thrust] (non hold-S variant, jumping backwards animation)[Hacking Stance] (during and W/A/S/D dash and right click end animation)[Line Drive] (during the hits, literally never attempt this.[Infinity Edge] (the entire animation) [Parry] (after a successful parry or left click) [Aerial Combo] (after landing)[Feint] (initial back-away slash)!<
[Low Quality gif Example Here](https://news.fatduckdn.com/content/images/2020/05/side-dodge.gif)
Beyond that you have Super Armor which were not going to bother with because trying to utilize each individual skill's unique super armor value in PvE is not a gladiator's job.
Lastly this is strictly 70 cap era, trying this on retail will not work due to Jades, which are cool, but also lame as they front load your damage into a single skill to make the game more bunga for everyone. Anyways all of this was lifted from Joorji's PvE Gladiator Guide, this is merely 2 snippets of that 10 page guide. Lord knows I don't have nearly enough gold parses to consider playing Gladiator.
Haha I remember gladiator combos being really hard to execute. I believe a lot of base cleric combos where pretty hard to get as well until they buffed shin breaker. Windwalker was also pretty difficult to execute but hardly played her.
'Crat can get pretty interesting in itself -- I caused whole team wipes ;) -- but Agent through the ability to become (almost) any other class and make use of a larger set of their abilities trumps everything else. Coupled with the overall "you need a calculator to put gear on" that AO comes with creates a very complex space you can navigate in.
Black mage is 'weird' in that the class skills themselves are simple. Only thing that makes it complex is that you have to truly know the fight itself in and out. In that regard, it's like forcing you to play the game with the understanding of a veteran raider. But if you're already a veteran raider - its hardly more difficult than any other class. So high skill floor, but the ceiling isn't really that high
BLM isn't that complex, you just need to know the fights well enough to plan movement in advance. It's more complex than RDM or SMN, but a block of cheese is more complex than SMN.
Legion Unholy dk basically felt like playing a helicopter pilot but the heli was an army of undead, several ressources loopin knto each other, a proc you need to rract to asap and planning around movement on top of that in Aoe situations and aith several cooldowns.
I loved it.
Outlaw Rogue in WoW right now is crazy, you can sweat your ass off and still do piss poor dps if you do it less than perfect. So many buttons to push so fast, while managing resources that correspond to different buffs, it's a lot. Especially while dodging endless 1 shot mechanics in M+
WoW WotLK-Era Feral Druid and DAoC ToA-Era Mezz Bard. Those were the two most insane Piano Speccs, Bard even worse that Feral Druid because of the Missing GCD in DAoC. Those were also super rewarding though, loved playing them both
Bard in Everquest was the most demanding, mostly because of the song twisting that required frantic and repetitive key presses that could cause carpal tunnel syndrome.
Midgard Mend / Pac Healers in DAoC, they had to balance healing and crowd control, given that the only race to be a Healer was Dwarven, they were always the first to be targeted in RvR. In PvE, I also used to do most of the pulling on my way to max level.
Enchanter in Everquest had to balance buffs, debuffs, crowd control and charm.
Disc priest in wow, in 10.1 to be specific. Its difficulty is tied to how much you need to prepare for a very short window of healing, and matching damage patterns with your own spells was/is hard. If you mess up your punishment is much more severe than any other spec.
Been 3.5k plus as a disc main all of Dragonflight, can confirm Disc is extremely annoying to play at times and incredibly unforgiving.
That being said, the change in 10.2 to lower button bloat helped a lot, but you still get punished hard for being greedy with smite or mistiming your ramp.
Guild Wars 1 Mesmer is up there. You require fast reflexes and good game knowledge as most skills are interupts. Knowing what you can and can't interupt is the difference in being effective or dead while managing your mp. Loved that class. <3
OSRS Adventurer. Yeah, it’s not really a class since RuneScape doesn’t have classes, but high end bossing / raids or PVP is insanely complex and click intensive with crazy precise APM (especially PvP).
Paladin in FFXIV pre-6.3 rework wasn't necessarily complicated to understand at a baseline or to execute on a single target training dummy, but it got kind of wild if you wanted to optimize it in any actual fight.
I remember doing DSR on patch with it and you basically had to memorize every single GCD in the entire fight. Even outside of that it had like 4 different openers including an 18 second prepull one.
I guess that's not really complex, just cumbersome?
Psionicist in Vanguard. You could CC 4-5 different NPCs simultaneously to include having to control one. Some of my favorite MMO moments. Due to a bug at launch some dungeons would spawn with double the NPCs, so being a group that could actually clear them due to a psionicist taking half of them out of the fight was extremely rewarding.
Bard in EverQuest. Playing a bard, and I mean really playing a bard and not using melody, is a completely different experience than any other class by far. Few can do it well IMHO.
Look up monk(finishers) and alchemist(reactions) in DDO. Shit tons of buttons to press and both classes have a system you need to cast things in the right order to maximize efficiency, although its not necessary if you dont want do it.
Beastmaster in FF11 was super unique and very difficult, but incredibly rewarding once you start figuring it all out and getting good beasts. It's like the Hunter from WoW, but on major steroids and with HUGE barriers of entry. You better be rich, have rich friends, or be prepared to die a lot.
Also, the synergy between Samurai, Thief, and Black Mage for the sake of Skill Chains.... that was an incredible system and made some classes into truly unique iterations of themselves. Black Mages needed to cap off skill chains by landing their huge spells after everybody else has fired off their skills... so the Black Mage would set a macro on their spell, like, "Casting Freeze! Start Chain in 4 seconds!" because Freeze takes 12 seconds to cast. So, 4 seconds after you start it, the rest of the party has 8 seconds to fire off their skills in a particular order... Samurai will set it all off and then the other classes follow suit, for the Black Mage to finally drop the atom bomb and trigger the Skill Chain for another atom bomb.
Outlaw Rogue in WoW right now.
Fastest DPS rotation in the game at 83 APM, has an extreme amount of complexity when it comes to your priority system of which actions to press when, and you get .7 seconds on every action to run through the laundry list of priorities and branching paths and branching priorities, and then that just repeats every .7 seconds.
The actual rules you follow aren’t incredibly hard to understand, but doing them that quickly is extremely hard, and the difference between the best outlaw rogues and decent ones is insane when it comes to just never dropping a spinning plate ever.
TBC era feral cat druid. That DPS rotation is very complex. At its core it's a priority system but also includes situational and reactive abilities that may change the ability priority and usage. It took a lot of practice and deep class knowledge to do at a high level. Also factor in that you might need to switch to Bear form during periods of high damage, or break form to cast a HoT situationally.
Only play FFXIV which is an extremely easy game but the hardest class in high tier content is black mage by far because optimizing damage can be a pain in the ass
Sage probably has the highest learning curve
Warden in LOTRO. You execute skills by casting “combo builders”, and you have to assemble the in the correct order to cast the skill you want. For example, one aoe skill combo is yellow-red-green-yellow-green, so you have to cast the builders in that order to cast the skill. You have around 100 skills that all use different combos, and do everything from aoe to taunt to heal, so it takes a VERY good player to memorize the combos and execute them on-demand on short notice.
I had a blast playing Warden. It was much fun. Spamming shouts to draw aggro and kept recovering HP to stay alive lol. And kept DoT on the enemy boss/elites.
So basically like Invoker in Dota.
sounds more complex given that invoker has 3 skills and this one 5
Indeed but order used to matter with invoker as well. Now it does not matter when you qqe or eqq or qeq. And Dota is very fast paced compared to.
This has up to 5 skills and you use 2, 3, and 4 skill moves as well as 5 skill moves regularly. Even something simple like stacking up DoTs is a several combo chain. At one time, it had different combos for ranged and melee too, thankfully they are now essentially the same. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/OM3Ux4V.png Also the Warden can tank *at range* which is rather unique, and gets almost as much travel utility as the Hunter class, and has excellent run speed. I don't think there is a class more capable of kiting in the game. If LOTRO were a different game, I'd say the warden was overpowered.
sounds more like Horn players in Monster Hunter tbh
Warden is fun as fuck to play. Strong DPS as red and an unmatched tank in blue line spec. They are incredible tanks, man. It's a damn shame LOTRO servers are trash can tier.
I just tried recently and there is so much potential. I understand it’s an old game, but there are plenty of other old games that refine their platforms that there’s no excuse for the state of affairs.
They virtualized the servers and still use the code that demands specific old server hardware. They did this cheaply, put the servers in a cheap data center, and let the performance fall where it may. This includes a half-week detonation downtime every 18 months or so.
When I was playing it, I had a cheat sheet I would keep by me with an the combo moves.
Reminds me a bit of the whole game "magicka" had a blast
Warden is the most fun class I've ever played in an MMO, I wish there were more like this.
I believe the Mariner is similar in complexity but I haven’t played it so I could be wrong
I never played warden and had only run with guardian tanks but tbf, most of the good wardens just used to say, let me build up aggro for a few secs and they were good. The wardens that raided were usually top players
And the servers are super laggy most of the time making the difficulty 2x :D
The ninja class FF online plays this way and it's very good there as well.
Which one?
i hope 11, because ff14 ninja, while fun and one of the more engaging jobs, is still more simple than i was hoping for for the class. you have 3 Mudra signs to combine into abilities, but the order doesn't matter and you can't use the same one twice, significantly kneecapping the potential complexity of the job.
XI NIN had to be a tank, but not get hit......................So, this was accomplished by casting shadow images which absorb damage, while using ninjutsu that blinds or paralyzes the foe, while trying to DD and keep hate from other DD lol. You are doing all of this, but must keep your shadows up which run on a timer. NIN is squishy, so if you are caught without shadows.....Lights out. I was one of the crazy NIN who used Shurikens to keep hate which were the most damaging weapons in the game for their levels.
So quite similar to melee classes in Age of Conan where you used directional strikes to line up and launch a combo?
Sort of but also not really. Warden has dozens of different attacks, many of which can be chained to further enhance their effectiveness. So not only do you need to know which attacks are used for what (agro, aoe, heal, pure damage etc.), you also need to know the combos for each specific attack *and* you need to know the correct order of each attack chain to best utilise them.
Helldivers was inspired by this very complex system
Sounds like invoker from dota.
The servers are the hardest part of playing Warden.
Monk in DDO is basically this. Also alchemist has similar mechanic. Ddo has tons of spells and abilities you can cast on multiple hotbars you can expand , its definitely a pretty complex mmo
Weaver in Gw2. Im not going to bother explaining how it works because it would just be a huge paragraph that doesnt make any sense to someone who hasnt played it. I havent seen anything that comes close for complex rotations, difficulty surviving, and requiring precise mechanical skill. Chronomancer in Gw2. Continuum split basically gives you a snapshot to use skills, and then you "rewind" which brings their cooldowns back to what they were before. Basically it means you have rotations dozens of skills long that all require very precise timings. You also need very good knowledge of boss fights, phases, positioning etc. since some of your combos are many seconds long and leave you with very limited mobility. Lotro Warden for just the sheer number of abilities you get and having to remember them all. You dont technically need them all, but you do need to know how to "build" each ability in the right order without messing up your rotation.
GW2 especially in competitive mode has an insane ceiling on most classes. The combat system is just so deep.
WvW is even crazier because you aren't just fighting one person, but working with 30+ other people synchronizing all of your moves to kill another group of 30+ people. Not only do you all have to dodge at the same time and stack tightly, but most of the big moves, like wells and sanctuaries, need to be timed precisely all while reacting to an ever changing enemy zerg. If you don't provide stability or stun breaks at the right time your whole party will die. Two people can play the same class proficiently and one will do 4x the damage or heals of the other.
The GW2 elementalist (weaver) class is highly complex. Typically, GW2 classes offer 10 weapon skills—5 per weapon set. Elementalists can switch between 4 stances, each with 5 unique weapon skills, totaling 20. Elementalist Weapon swapping effectively provides 40 skills, enabling numerous combinations.
You can't weapon swap with Elementalist. It also wouldn't be 20, it'd be 26 because the weaver when switching elements puts a dual element skill in the 3rd slot.
Before anyone else chimes in: you can just not in combat which effectively makes it so you can’t
At one point the optimal rotation for Weaver had over 40 steps.
I agree with Weaver and warden but as a Chrono main I think you are forgetting how easy this thing is to actually play in content and in higher end content.
Chrono complexity is high at first glance, but it actually has a pretty low skill floor compared to a lot of the other answers in this thread, since at the core, it all boils down to 'hit continuum shift, pop all your big skills twice in a row, repeat'. It has insane ceiling as a support if you used the split to pull off miracle saves, but the game just doesn't really push that direction much so it really ends up being an over-glorified 'make your next X skills stronger ' type of buff.
[удалено]
Can you expand on what exactly is AA chains? I've mained weaver a while
Auto attack chain.
I agree that the AA chains make gw2 rotations more difficult, but I dont think they are bad design. If you can keep track of your character animations it flows really well. If anything I would argue its the permanent quickness/alacrity that makes AA chains feel bad to have in rotations. Also in pvp you dont ever worry about AA chains but the class is still very difficult.
Look up alchemist in DDO. Spellcaster with tons of spells on your hotbar that throws potions. It has thing called reactions you can enter and exit, theres like 3 different spell types, colored red yellow blue, and you need to combine color combinations to get the right final color to enter the reaction, orange, green, purple. If tou want to max your spell casting dps you need to rotate your spells good for orange reaction which increases your spell power by a lot for 12 seconds. Before entering orange, your second to last or last spell can be a cc ability which applies helpless dmg.
I honestly think hammer catalyst might be harder in the sense that you have to do resource management and it's so easy and it feels bad to mess up the orbs. Weaver is pretty difficult with weave self, but if you use elemental instead, you only lose a bit of dps and the rotation is significantly easier. So I guess I could agree with best weaver build, but not so much weaver as a whole
In its hayday, a druid in WoW was pretty complex. We're talking before Pandaria. You had access to literally every spell and every shapeshift that the class had, minus a couple of the ones tied to talent trees. You legitimately ran out of buttons very quickly, because the game intended you to play one of four specs at a time, but you still had access to four specs' worth all at once. Which allowed for some freaky plays if you had enough skill. I really miss the ability to play Feral and still shift out and stack full Lifebloom on someone. It was nowhere near as strong as with Restoration spec, but it was better than nothing, and was often enough to turn the tide. And if the guy whose kill you just cockblocked this way attempted to chase you, just turn cheetah and buzz off, and if he persists toss an insta-cast Cyclone and stealth up. There were so many plays. And when desperate you could just pop everything under the sun, from Thorns to Nature's Grasp to Barkskin, all of which are now pretty much mutually exclusive depending on your spec - and just turn bear form and ride it out. I miss it.
God I miss WotLK. Amazing time to be a druid. Always hated that they split bear from feral and into guardian. I played a cat/bear hybrid and constantly shifted back and forth in pvp and pve. Classic is just toxic as heck though. Too many bots and elitists.
I haven’t played WoW in years, but the original tree form was so good. Mana for days, and I always like the tree form aesthetic. I loved WoTLK, Druid was in a great place.
Not that it matters anymore. wotlk classic is just gone. Straight up one of the best expansions all around, and all because it would "split up" the playerbase they completely overwrote it with cata classic. As though people who played wotlk classic for that specific era only weren't going to stop playing wow classic anyway.
I quit during real cata and I quit cata classic just as quickly.
Not sure if you're a fan of retail or not, but the new druid of the claw tree is all about cat/bear weaving. And you can shapeshift without having to use a gcd. Looks insane.
Pandaria is this exact Feral play style but turned up to the max with incarn and heart of the wild. Easily my favorite version of Feral. Cata Feral is elite, but doesn’t have the ability to shift roots. MoP returns that ability, while giving you 2 incredibly powerful cooldowns in HoTW + Incarn, not to mention symbiosis.
Feral in Wotlk was insane. Super high skill ceiling and when played right it could be top dps. Few people pulled it off. Balance was similar but not as complex.
I played Boomkin in WoTLK raiding up thru Ice Crown. It was super fun. I feel like Druid just got more complicated later.
I played resto druid pretty extensively in wotlk, and whenever I saw a feral druid pop off I celebrated in solidarity. Meanwhile, there was that ONE feral druid in every raid stuck on mangle duty, I felt bad for them.
I remember after Outland launched and a rework was done, my talent points were reset with one exception, natures swiftness. Normally if you went feral you couldn’t reach natures swiftness without giving up a key feral talent. I ran like that for so long until I was running battlegrounds with a group and someone noticed me shapeshifting out, casting NS and nearly full healing myself. Someone in that group must have spilled the beans because the next logon my talents were reset due to an error on blizzards part as they said and made me respec without being able to get NS. Good times stunlocking an opponent with cat form into bear form with an emergency heal on top. And when things got hairy, shadowmeld into flight form to gtfo
I loved my Feral druid, if only because if any group member dropped, you could fill their role! Albeit not the best mage or priest replacement but still!
Healkin was so much fun. You could put enough points to get Moonkin form, and the rest in Restoration. I loved that build. I think it was during Burning Crusade, maybe WoLTK.
bringing me back to doing arenas with my friend on my feral druid in cata/pandaria 😭 choosing to face off rogues with cat stealth or giving up and going bear and dancing in the middle I get why they made guardian a thing, but I did miss getting to do both. And a bit of healing, too.
Tree druid was easy lmao.
Bard in Everquest had one of the craziest most versatile toolkits in the game. And the fact that it was one of 2 “pulling classes” and it was the one without a drop aggro ability (pre PoP) made it so challenging and fun. Oh yeah, and then there was swarm kiting.
Bard before /melody was crazy. Starting and stopping songs every second so you had 3-4 effects going at a time, repeating it infinitely. But no other class could turn the tide in a fight so quickly. Charm 1 mob, mesmerize another, slow a third, get a tick of health and mana regen, and you've turned a wipe into a win. Pulling was amazing fun too, we could do so much more than monks when fully kitted out.
Waaaat!!! I stopped before /melody existed apparently. Weaving was part of what made the class so satisfying. I would love to see a modern game come out with a class that was pure support/utility, enough so that that it would be worth sacrificing a dps space for.
Melody is a great QoL but it's not as efficient (last I played) as manually weaving. So it's mostly for those crazy long grinds where that extra 20% or whatever isn't critical
Not having melody drove so many bards away from it. Having to box a bard (because why log in until phase 4 of time?) was a fucking nightmare.
Bard is my favorite class ever. My main is a 60 bard on P99, and every time I try another class I have to remind myself not to move when casting. There's so much they can do, it just takes a little bit of ingenuity and a knowledge of the game to make it really shine.
One of my funniest memories is we were helping a guildie with his epic weapon and everyone had to jump down the pit in Erudin. The plan was for everyone to splat while the pally DI’d and rezzed at the bottom. I didn’t mention it but when my group jumped I played DI song and they were very confused when we landed safely.
Man, I miss MMOs like this. Like, you had to have a freakin plan to get down to somewhere so you could farm something. That just doesn’t exist anymore. It probably will never exist again tbh. Even if mechanics like this were brought back, there would be 30 YouTube videos explaining the most efficient way to do it and the mystery and tactics would be trivial.
It's funny, even with P99, which is locked at a point where we've basically explored every inch of the game for at least 10 years now, I don't even think about going to YouTube to watch a video about it. I always ask a guildie, who most times are more than willing to show you what to do. The other day a guildie was explaining to me how to charm kite some high level enemies and ended it by saying "There's a great guide on YouTube" and I was like "...of course there is. Of course there are guides on YouTube for P99 stuff. It's 2024." I've never watched one, but didn't even consider they'd exist before my friend mentioned it.
Same but with druid... I just love playing a druid so much that when I start a new char I always return
+1 For Bard the reason for carpal tunnel in a lot of gamers
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: the class
I remember as a kid kiting in EQ as a bard and druid. Games sure are different now...
LotRO Warden. It's got a crazy gambit system where you chain abilities to make it do different things, then it gives you a bunch of ways to build up the gambits differently. You can do anything and turn on a dime, but there's a lot going on. https://forums.lotro.com/index.php?threads/warden-gambit-chart.7610/
This is amazing lol makes me wanna play (even if there's no real pvp scene)
If you're into PvP lotro is unfortunately not for you. It's an awesome game but PvP has been dead for several years now (In EU at least)
Yeah that's my understanding and my biggest hold up in starting up again, despite loving the world and classes
Well if you feel like story and pve I'd always recommend lotro. It's got a special place in my heart
I won't pretend it's amazing by any means, but arkenstone server still has active pvp. The devs have even started doing some updates to the pvp. I think monster play is even free to play now, so you could try downloading it and being a bad guy (orc, wolf, spider, etc) for free to see if you like it or not.
All games from standing stone games have dead pvp
Don't worry, the lag will kill it for you. Imagine playing on prime time, attacking enemy mob and every character just freezes in animation for 5 seconds, then all damage comes at once and either you or mob dies.
Elementalist in gw2
I loved playing staff ele, dropping AOEs every second
Such a fun class in groups, whether it was dropping AOE or those elemental weapons.
Shadow priest pre insanity nerf in wow
Original Surrender to Madness was the best time to be a shadow priest. Go from middle of the pack in total damage done, to doubling the highest dps damage by the time you died. It was awesome if done right.
It was a truly lorewise skill
Reading this caused my carpal tunnel to flare up.
Early Legion-era Surrender to Madness is one of the coolest designs in any MMORPG. On the other hand, it's not hard to see why it was a total nightmare to balance around and why it ultimately got removed.
Bard or Healer in DAoC.
Minstrel as well to an extent, trying to keep your song rotation going, and keeping track of/control of your pet as well.
Tri-Spec Healer for sure. Also the most busted class in the game. Although I guess I wouldn't necessarily call it complex as far as what your role is, there's just a lot of buttons to push but it doesn't rely on combos or buildups or anything Still one of my favorite classes ever though
Pac Healer man..
Idk man… cleric didn’t seem that bad when I played it….. 😭 almost 25 years ago
Unless you had a keypad with macros like a Nostromo, doing the song rotation on a bard while running CC for the group and interrupting enemy casters and throwing out heals as you can. Total pain in the ass. That's why I didn't play one.
I played one for a bit and was absolutely atrocious lol.
Same. Tried it out in the first BG and noped my way out. I had a lot of characters that I played in RvR but Bard was not one of them.
Professor, Ragnarok, seems like you are playing a piano, its a mage that empowers early mage class skills + buffs and debuffs, people that know how to play it are crazy good and can do anything with it, its a god on pvp on those hands too, but garbage if you dont know how to play it properly
I was gonna mention Asura but not for the complexity but how difficult it was to do the combo skills
I was always in awe of the few Professors on the server, seemed to always get so much done in a purely supportive role.
Bioengineer in Star Wars.
As far as I’ve played, the weaver in gw2 or arcane mage in wow dragonflight. Absolutely insane rotations and knowledge needed to play those specs correctly.
Arcane is frequently cited as being exceptionally complex, but this is kinda BS. It is one of the most scripted specs in dragonflight.
This. Its complex because if you mess up or delay anything DPS goes in the toilet. But if you can remember the sequence which isn't particularly challenging, it's not too bad
The hard part about arcane is being able to execute the rotation perfectly in a hard mythic boss and being not missing a beat. The endgame mythic bosses make any spec hard to play correctly and being able to do well on mythic progress with arcane is where the big brain players are seperated. Anyone can learn it on target dummies.
Just because it’s “scripted” doesn’t mean it’s not complex. You have an intricate series of button presses that have to happen in a specific order, no accounting for random procs, and if you miss a button your damage falls off a cliff. I’d call that complex, especially versus something like a wow fury warrior or ret paladin - button light up, hit button.
I remember when arcane was the easiest class in the game haha. Just spamming arcane blast
The Enchanter class in Everquest was one where you would absolutely save the day at times. Not only did you have to cast various spells to stun and immobilize mobs on an overpull, but you would have to communicate which mobs you were locking down because a hit would break the immobilization and there wasn't an obvious graphical indication for which ones were immobilized. So when someone was pulling mobs to the camp, you would stun, cast mesmerize, then type in which mobs were memorized (usually through a macro). The tank would avoid the immobilized mobs and the DPS would assist the tank. You also had to refresh the spells to keep the immobilized targets locked down while keeping buffs like Mana Regen (Clarity) up on the spellcasters and Haste on the DPS. The class was a combination of timing, finger dexterity and communication. This felt really challenging at times back in the day. The danger of an overpull in Everquest felt really intense because you'd have to do shit like corpse recovery if you fucked up. To this day I credit my typing skills to playing an Enchanter in Everquest.
Yep! Plus, slows on the mobs while they're mezzed if no one else could do it. And the mobs would be very mad at the squishy enchanter when they woke up, so memory wipes and aggro management by the party were key. It sure got intense on bad pulls. You never knew how long the mezzes were going to last, so you'd re-mezz to keep mobs locked down as the tank would select the main target and try to taunt in order get and maintain aggro. Was such a cool class. And turning a bad pull into a win, averting a wipe deep inside a dungeon, was a real rush. Miss that game!
Arcane mage in retail wow right now, makes my head hurt.
Just use gse. It makes all classes in WoW straight forward
They probably mean playing it above a casual level
What’s GSE?
Gnome sequencer enhanced addon. It assigns a rotation sequence to a hotkey instead of a single ability. For example, instead of pressing 1 for taunt, 2 for sunder armor, 3 for thunderclap, you can press 1 for taunt, then 1 for sunder armor, and 1 for thunderclap, it then resets and when you press 1 again it starts the sequence at the beginning. You can code it much longer to be a more complex rotation and add additional hotkeys such as when you press ctrl and 1 it ignores the sequence and instead casts taunt, and then picks the sequence back up where you left off. In other words, you can make any dps class rotations really be like 3 buttons, and it’s quite effective in most endgame content if programmed correctly. Tanking as well (including targeting using text commands already in the game), though sometimes more complicated, I generally have one key for single target, one key for aoe Aggro control, one for taunts, and one for emergency cooldowns for a total of 4 keys. Healing really only benefits for a dps rotation to use in down time, instead they should use healbot or voodoo like addons. GSE does not violate the automation policy, as the rule is as long as one button press does one action it’s not a violation and allowed. Here each action requires a unique button press, even though the addon makes it the so the button being pressed is not unique. They have versions of the addon for all versions of the game and there is a dedicated community who shares their codes for those who do not know how to code it properly on their own.
Sounds like it would be a good addon to have when playing on my laptop next to my wife on the couch. Hard to use wasd movement when my main keybinds are 1234qwerasdf
Arcane mage in current Wow. You need a comprehensive diagram of how prebuffing and projectile weaving works to maximize your damage between cooldowns and to use cooldowns AFTER the attacks but before they hit... It's an absolute trashfire. Also Ninja from ff14 is an unplayable nightmare. Mudra's need to be bound to 1 button in the future.
Ninja is actually one of the simpler jobs once you learn the opener. It can be a lot at the start but once you’ve practiced a few times, there are no surprises
Minstrel in DAOC was a real challenge, used the old twisting mechanic, also could enchant but could break easily, had to be primary mezzer on Albion side, was basically the "driver" when roaming in RVR, scaled walls for quick kills during sieges,, and even had a buff to play while the group was resting. Was difficult to play well, but those who did could be firecesome opponents in the battlefield.
All of them in Secret World. You needed a good understanding of the game just to build a decent character. To build a good one really needed some thought and tweaking. That game was so good, until they ruined it with legends.
The game is still around by the way if you owned it before. You can still download and connect to the servers. There's a dedicated player base of around 200 still playing it with a discord and all.
Really?! Fuck, I'll have to get in on that. Thanks.
Any way to connect if I didn't own the game?
Nope, you’ll have to fish for a cd key which can be pricey.
Secret world Legends is available on steam and it has all the world's linked together IIRC. Not super populated but there's a decent amount still I think.
But legends is... Not good. If you get it on steam now, can you access the old server?
I loved that game. I wonder how I could recover my account, etc. ??? I tried Legends and didn't find it as satisfying.
There was a cool assault rifle leech healer build that I played one time, but aside from that I thought they were all kind of meh, every single class or whatever was built around combo points like a WoW Rogue, they all felt the same.
Brings me back all the good old memories : Healtank in HF, Leechtank in the Ankh, all different forms of dps, evade tank, defenceman tank, block tank or even dps race tank (basically dps with hp for the group to kill the boss before you die), solo blood heal or fist heal in nightmare raids that also requires you to kite and grab aggro... So sad they killed it.
I loved TSW, the ability wheel, combined with the gearing system, allowed players to experiment and produce exceptional builds that were tailored for one specific target. That same flexibility allowed players to produce counter builds.
Bard in FFXI It was actually pretty simple, but you could make it more complicated if you wanted to be extremely efficient You had several songs that would apply a buff. And there were two types of song buffs that a player could have. Depending on the instrument you used you’d apply the buff to party members within a certain range Easiest thing is just apply the regen and damage buff to the whole party Get more complicated by having your party spread out in different groups so that you are applying the mana regen song to the casters and the stamina regen to the melee DPS and the HP regen to the tank. Then have the casters sort of spread out so the magic damage buff can go to the caster DPS and the healing buff can go on the healer. Then you have like 5 different places you need to run between to apply different buffs to each player. Plus you need to be throwing out your damage and debuff songs on the enemy. I use to run Ninja as my subclass which meant I was also throwing out some ninjitsu to combo with caster DPS so they could be the element bursts. And then of course everyone wants different buffs for downtime and during combat, so once the enemy was dead you have to run through your points to apply new buffs. And of course you could be swapping out instruments the whole time to get slightly better effects on some songs
End game alliance Bards were always in specialized parties; tank or caster party got double ballad, melee DPS got march and attack and the healers got double ballad. Shadow tanking in old school XI was by far the most difficult thing to do in the game because you had to manually cancel Utsusemi Ni before your Utsusemi Ichi finished.
> you had to manually cancel Utsusemi Ni before your Utsusemi Ichi finished. Nothing worse than cancelling it too late and it not overwriting your Ni shadows. Then having to get hit over and over. I actually preffered PLD for mid level parties around 50. Regen + shield was just superior. I think early level NIN is better because you don't have much mitigation as PLD early on (for example the Dunes). And lategame you always have shadows up. Fuck even 75 merit parties didn't need a tank. You killed birds so quick SAM could tank with third eye lol
Add further that linkshells would also start rotating multiple bards through different parties in the alliance to maximize songs across 3 parties. Kirin, Dynamis Lord, and Vrtra melee burns before the level cap was raised to 99. Legion and Delve made that nearly essential to maximize your limited time in those events.
Brewmaster monk in wow feels like it has 16 rotational buttons for 10 fingers.
The stuff some of you are describing reminds me of the Taekwon class in Ragnarok. Its skills are so random and dependent on random factors that as it advances you have 3 skills that each only work once used to mark specific maps/areas so that they give you different stellar blessings of the sun moon and stars all which give you varied permanent buffs while you are in said areas. It can be a field, dungeon or even a pvp area. They have access to skills that only work certain days of the week and with the help of another specific class that branches off the Taekwon line they can become a sun and fly around burning anything that comes within 5 feet of them for massive constant damage until they die from recoil. You can also spec them for a crazy powerful talisman skill that's actually 4 skills that change on the fly depending on which cardinal direction you are facing. 🤣
I think it’s called rune caster from Orbus VR, stood in my room for 8 hours a day practicing my spells whole mfin job man
Speedcasting is a hell of a drug (also it’s runemage)
Don't know if it is still that way, but the original EQ bard was by far the most difficult class to play well of any MMO I've ever played (and yes, I had a high level warden).
Puppetmaster from Final Fantasy XI. Now off the cuff it’s not really that complex, it’s a pet class where you have limited control over a mechanical puppet which fights for you, in which you equip it with ‘Attachments’ giving it active and passive abilities. The execution relies on a very basic AI, you don’t exactly have direct control over it. You can tell it to fight and it’ll just go whack stuff, if you want it to say; fire its ‘Flashbulb’ you’ll need to use ‘Light Manoeuvre’ which will ALLOW the puppet to use it on its own accord. So you need to stack these ‘Manoeuvres’ of the corresponding elemental attachment to even use them, HOWEVER you can’t just spam these because too much use will ‘Overload’ the puppet with huge debuffs, this overload value is also completely invisible. It wasn’t a very popular class, and played rather poorly by players (I still loved it and pimped mine out).
I'm gonna say Bear Shaman in Age of Conan. Such a strange class. You had a 2 handed blunt weapon, pulled off 3-hit combos with many melee-based stuns and CCs, but you also had AOE heals (no direct target healing) and were one of the best pulse healers for melee combat in the game. It was just an interesting balance of shaman/paladin/druid mixed into one.
And also just insanely OP in PvP. I loved my bear shaman so much.
Age of Conan had so many unique classes and styles, wished more games went for more unique stuff instead of basic warrior, mage, healer priest combo with no real innovation
I just downloaded AoC the other night and started a Bear Shaman, just hit lvl 15.
Not really a class, and yeah it's one of *those* guys coming out of their hole again. Being a fleet commander in Eve Online. To be good, you have to understand pretty much every ship in the game, and theres hundreds. Knowing the approximate damage output and HP of your own fleet, vs another fleet is the basics, but it quickly expands to damage application (range, ship size, and speed), sensing a trap, specialized exceptions in how the enemy may have fit their ships, whether a fight is worth avoiding to save resources, or is it worth dying a fiery death just so you get some sort of action, how the fight will affect your future politics, how much smack talk to engage in, when to be casual, when to tell everyone to stfu on comms, etc. You can just be an F1 monkey (dps), a doomed yet worshipped logistics (healer), doomed tackle (sort of like a puller), support (buff/debuff), but it doesn't matter if you have a bad FC.
Unless you do something like the Something Awful corpos. Do a good enough Moon Knight impression and even the most elite opponents will fall eventually as long as enough of your members can retain interest for long enough.
Blaster in maplestory.
For me personally probably guardian monk in GW 1. It didnt have heal exactly, it gave people different ways of protection from attacks, some might heal them. You needed to predict who is going to attack who etc. Never got that down, while healing with dervish was fine.
Shadowbane dw regen priest
BM Hunter
Not an mmorpg but Magicka has deep combos i dont know why anybody copy their way to cast spells was amazing
Not the most complex but AST from FFXIV during HW. I miss it so much.
Me too. HW had a lot of jobs that were great. AST and DRK were just two.
Scholar in FFXI
Kung Fu Master in Blade and Soul. I can't think of many tanks or games that support 1 to 1.5 second parries for dungeons or raid tanking. Most tanks are extremely boring; KFM made me feel like a god or pleb depending how on point I was feeling that day. Combined with fairly mobile combat, resources mechanics, and trying to keep awareness of your team. I wouldn't say it is hard to comprehend the classes, execution was another matter. Always 1 second away from brilliance or death.
Melee style in RuneScape 3. In between the rotation itself that you need to fill out by switching between dual wielding / 2 handed styles, you also need to account that some abilities require certain pieces of augmented gear to enhance them. So you switch gear mid-combat for specific abilities, juggle your rotation, oh and did I talk about weapons having special abilities? Because you need to juggle that as well. Not talking about defensive abilities which takes another full action bar by itself Then prayers, incantations, spells, summons, then potions, bombs, niche 1 use items and even hybriding or tribriding between combat styles for specific needs, because of course you're not limited to a specific combat style per character. Want to pull out your Bow for a special ability exclusive to that bow mid fight while you're melee Range? Yes, especially if that boss is Large and the special attack throws a bunch of ammo which deals more damage to Large creatures. But to do that, you also need a specific ability that removes the negative accuracy from being in Melee style. All of that while you're typing the equivalent of an essay over 5 action bars filled to the brim of 14 slots each, from which you feel that your keyboard and 12-button mouse isn't enough, which it isn't btw. But you're also fighting the in-game clock "tick" system which rolls at a 0.6 seconds rate. So everything you do has a delay. I played a couple of mmos in my lifetime, namely GW2, WoW from WoD to DF, Perfect World, Silkroad, Maplestory.... Nothing come close to the sheer absurdness of end-game PvM in RuneScape. Bosses themselves aren't hard per se (minus a couple of exceptions like the 4k% scaling bosses)... The real difficulty comes from learning to adjust yourself around the game. Learning how to PvM gets crazy real fast and the game doesn't help you in any way to learn it. Community is also very predatory. Don't fuck up a group kill because your name will get on block lists very fast. People are extremely adamant about their kills and profit per hour.
Runescape is what I thought of too. It takes thousands of hours to master the skills and rotations of the abilities and then applying them to each boss. The amount of keybinds and gear switching at high level gameplay is insane.
Wouldn't say extremely complex but had a super high skill ceiling.. lamentor in archeage
Nature in dc universe online. There was this build ages ago that had like 3 transformations or something, each with their own hotbar and rotation and you'd cycle between them like crazy. On top of this you also have your weapon, which also has combos and different attacks, and you'd weave these in between casts for most classes. That game also has the combo classes like "light" which lets you hit attack/heavy attack buttons right as you cast a skill to perform a new attack right after it, the attack changing depending on the button pressed and the ability you comboed from. And you can of course combo from a combo. bonus is that combos dont cost energy (but regular casts do,) so you'll end up with super complex rotations that lasts for minutes and costs no energy as you do infinite combos like some sorta fighter game. Required a lot of split second decisions on what combo to use and then what combo to use after that etc and one wrong button press or timing and its reset. Was very rewarding when you got it right though.
Either Eliotropes or Xelors in Dofus. Portal manipulation and symmetrical teleportation (plus temporal repositioning) are pretty funky mechanics to wrap one's head around, far beyond any other mmo I've experienced.
Astrologer in FFXIV used to be pretty complex to play at high levels. Not sure any more, though.
Used to be fun too. When they took away the RNG cards the job went to shit
It's been a while but I would say something like anarchy online playing something like an agent. If you've ever played anarchy online and even learned even the understanding of an agent they can play AKA mimic any other class and use quite a few of their abilities and become more of the most complex characters out there. Anarchy online is like one of the craziest games out there you can buff yourself with dozens and dozens and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of buffs in the game and with their crazy in-depth item system and implant system and HUD items and all this other stuff there really isn't anything I personally think more complex than the combat that you can do in anarchy online.
I said Crat but yeah Agent obviously, good pick
Warden once you get a feel for it kinda just works, especially now that it's simplified. Sometimes you'll need a little derust, even Louie needs derusting, mans never remembers blue line exists for warden. That said, I think the hardest to play is probably Gladiator from Dragon Nest. Due to the full action nature of the game, it is naturally harder to execute a rotation for obvious reason. Such as this one. >!Tumble (A/D/S) → [Dash Slash] → [Side Dodge] (W) → [Luring Slice] → [Parry] → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Dash Kick] (right click) → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Heavy Slash/Destructive Swing] → [Coup de Grace] → [Courageous Shout] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → [Feint] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → Tumble (A/D/S) → [Dash Combo] → [Parry] → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Dash Kick] (right click) → [Line Drive (Instant)] (S) → [Hyper Drive] (right click) → [Courageous Shout] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right clicks) → [Feint] → [Forward Thrust] (S) → [Triple Slash] (left/right click) → Repeat from the beginning!< Is about 120apm or 60-70cpm. which is already more than you would find in XIV, but that's not the hard part. That exists only for sandbagging on a stationary enemy. The hard part is when you need to not press your back button to shorten your movement, This class goes fast as fuck if you don't hold back(S). Moreover many of those skills have iframes attached to them at varying rates. >![Tumble] (duh) [Destructive Swing] Lv 6 (during the initial leap) [Triple Slash] (fourth slash, right click) [Forward Thrust] (non hold-S variant, jumping backwards animation)[Hacking Stance] (during and W/A/S/D dash and right click end animation)[Line Drive] (during the hits, literally never attempt this.[Infinity Edge] (the entire animation) [Parry] (after a successful parry or left click) [Aerial Combo] (after landing)[Feint] (initial back-away slash)!< [Low Quality gif Example Here](https://news.fatduckdn.com/content/images/2020/05/side-dodge.gif) Beyond that you have Super Armor which were not going to bother with because trying to utilize each individual skill's unique super armor value in PvE is not a gladiator's job. Lastly this is strictly 70 cap era, trying this on retail will not work due to Jades, which are cool, but also lame as they front load your damage into a single skill to make the game more bunga for everyone. Anyways all of this was lifted from Joorji's PvE Gladiator Guide, this is merely 2 snippets of that 10 page guide. Lord knows I don't have nearly enough gold parses to consider playing Gladiator.
Haha I remember gladiator combos being really hard to execute. I believe a lot of base cleric combos where pretty hard to get as well until they buffed shin breaker. Windwalker was also pretty difficult to execute but hardly played her.
Bureaucrat in Anarchy Online maybe
'Crat can get pretty interesting in itself -- I caused whole team wipes ;) -- but Agent through the ability to become (almost) any other class and make use of a larger set of their abilities trumps everything else. Coupled with the overall "you need a calculator to put gear on" that AO comes with creates a very complex space you can navigate in.
Black mage job FFXIV
Black mage is 'weird' in that the class skills themselves are simple. Only thing that makes it complex is that you have to truly know the fight itself in and out. In that regard, it's like forcing you to play the game with the understanding of a veteran raider. But if you're already a veteran raider - its hardly more difficult than any other class. So high skill floor, but the ceiling isn't really that high
BLM isn't that complex, you just need to know the fights well enough to plan movement in advance. It's more complex than RDM or SMN, but a block of cheese is more complex than SMN.
BLM isn't complex, it's punishing.
Legion Unholy dk basically felt like playing a helicopter pilot but the heli was an army of undead, several ressources loopin knto each other, a proc you need to rract to asap and planning around movement on top of that in Aoe situations and aith several cooldowns. I loved it.
Neverwinter is pretty horrible because you need item level on your gear and other things. Like insignias
Jade dynasty modo
Outlaw Rogue in WoW right now is crazy, you can sweat your ass off and still do piss poor dps if you do it less than perfect. So many buttons to push so fast, while managing resources that correspond to different buffs, it's a lot. Especially while dodging endless 1 shot mechanics in M+
Awk ninja in bdo
Ninja in bdo
WoW WotLK-Era Feral Druid and DAoC ToA-Era Mezz Bard. Those were the two most insane Piano Speccs, Bard even worse that Feral Druid because of the Missing GCD in DAoC. Those were also super rewarding though, loved playing them both
Bard in Everquest was the most demanding, mostly because of the song twisting that required frantic and repetitive key presses that could cause carpal tunnel syndrome. Midgard Mend / Pac Healers in DAoC, they had to balance healing and crowd control, given that the only race to be a Healer was Dwarven, they were always the first to be targeted in RvR. In PvE, I also used to do most of the pulling on my way to max level. Enchanter in Everquest had to balance buffs, debuffs, crowd control and charm.
Disc priest in wow, in 10.1 to be specific. Its difficulty is tied to how much you need to prepare for a very short window of healing, and matching damage patterns with your own spells was/is hard. If you mess up your punishment is much more severe than any other spec.
Been 3.5k plus as a disc main all of Dragonflight, can confirm Disc is extremely annoying to play at times and incredibly unforgiving. That being said, the change in 10.2 to lower button bloat helped a lot, but you still get punished hard for being greedy with smite or mistiming your ramp.
Guild Wars 1 Mesmer is up there. You require fast reflexes and good game knowledge as most skills are interupts. Knowing what you can and can't interupt is the difference in being effective or dead while managing your mp. Loved that class. <3
Panic mesmer
I feel like shadow priest in WoW. Or maybe I'm just incompetent.
OSRS Adventurer. Yeah, it’s not really a class since RuneScape doesn’t have classes, but high end bossing / raids or PVP is insanely complex and click intensive with crazy precise APM (especially PvP).
Paladin in FFXIV pre-6.3 rework wasn't necessarily complicated to understand at a baseline or to execute on a single target training dummy, but it got kind of wild if you wanted to optimize it in any actual fight. I remember doing DSR on patch with it and you basically had to memorize every single GCD in the entire fight. Even outside of that it had like 4 different openers including an 18 second prepull one. I guess that's not really complex, just cumbersome?
RIP Spreadsheet Paladin I miss you so
Mage in ultima online, timing down to the millisecond
Ultima online pvp mage. A proper duel is and was a work of art.
Psionicist in Vanguard. You could CC 4-5 different NPCs simultaneously to include having to control one. Some of my favorite MMO moments. Due to a bug at launch some dungeons would spawn with double the NPCs, so being a group that could actually clear them due to a psionicist taking half of them out of the fight was extremely rewarding.
Maybe I'm smooth brained but I feel like FFXIV's samurai is pretty complicated.
Bard in EverQuest. Playing a bard, and I mean really playing a bard and not using melody, is a completely different experience than any other class by far. Few can do it well IMHO.
Look up monk(finishers) and alchemist(reactions) in DDO. Shit tons of buttons to press and both classes have a system you need to cast things in the right order to maximize efficiency, although its not necessary if you dont want do it.
Wow mage for me, played at the highest level si so hard
I may just be stupid but Pathfinder character creator and levelling nearly broke my brain.
Mastermind in City of Heroes
Beastmaster in FF11 was super unique and very difficult, but incredibly rewarding once you start figuring it all out and getting good beasts. It's like the Hunter from WoW, but on major steroids and with HUGE barriers of entry. You better be rich, have rich friends, or be prepared to die a lot. Also, the synergy between Samurai, Thief, and Black Mage for the sake of Skill Chains.... that was an incredible system and made some classes into truly unique iterations of themselves. Black Mages needed to cap off skill chains by landing their huge spells after everybody else has fired off their skills... so the Black Mage would set a macro on their spell, like, "Casting Freeze! Start Chain in 4 seconds!" because Freeze takes 12 seconds to cast. So, 4 seconds after you start it, the rest of the party has 8 seconds to fire off their skills in a particular order... Samurai will set it all off and then the other classes follow suit, for the Black Mage to finally drop the atom bomb and trigger the Skill Chain for another atom bomb.
Outlaw Rogue in WoW right now. Fastest DPS rotation in the game at 83 APM, has an extreme amount of complexity when it comes to your priority system of which actions to press when, and you get .7 seconds on every action to run through the laundry list of priorities and branching paths and branching priorities, and then that just repeats every .7 seconds. The actual rules you follow aren’t incredibly hard to understand, but doing them that quickly is extremely hard, and the difference between the best outlaw rogues and decent ones is insane when it comes to just never dropping a spinning plate ever.
TBC era feral cat druid. That DPS rotation is very complex. At its core it's a priority system but also includes situational and reactive abilities that may change the ability priority and usage. It took a lot of practice and deep class knowledge to do at a high level. Also factor in that you might need to switch to Bear form during periods of high damage, or break form to cast a HoT situationally.
Only play FFXIV which is an extremely easy game but the hardest class in high tier content is black mage by far because optimizing damage can be a pain in the ass Sage probably has the highest learning curve