[rdonj]

Originally Posted by Crandaeolon

/de-lurk

Some good suggestions here, thanks. Got to check out that 'Crawl.

To the people talking about balance nerfs, item-based gameplay and level grinding... ever tried Guild Wars? As far as action RPGs go, it's pretty lenient on grinding or finding items, and even though skill rebalancing happens once in a while, re-speccing is free. Only the primary profession of the character is set in stone at character creation, otherwise you can freely change the "build" of the character after you've picked up the skills from quests or trainers. (There are 1300+ individual skills that result in literally hundreds of "viable" character builds, and many times that if you accept less viable ones.)

The "higher" forms of GW PvP are very strategic and demanding. There are no char level or gear differences, and lots of communication and coordination is required. However, it does take quite a commitment to build the skills and social networks required to break into PvP. Also, it certainly doesn't represent even remotely realistic fantasy army action - it's just small-teams tactics in a fantasy setting.

That was a good mention about guild wars, I wasn't really thinking about it when I wrote my massive wall of text post. It does have the benefit of avoiding completely destroying builds for the most part, and the item based level grind. As another poster said however, the gameplay wasn't completely appealing to me. I never got involved in pvp in guild wars though so I missed out on the main point of the game. It did have some good ideas.