Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Difference between revisions
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* Played a hundred percent straight in very early (and now defunct) MMO ''Sierra's Realm''. Warriors at early levels could solo quest easily, dealing considerable damage and killing monsters rather speedily, whereas mages were next to worthless on their own, unable to so much as dent even the rats in the newbie zone. At higher levels, Warriors could still hold their own, though they required full suits of top-tier armor and high-end weapons all sporting as many enchantments as was possible in order to keep any sort of pace with the harsher monsters and possible PVP encounters. High level mages, on the other hand, were capable of obliterating absolutely anything in their path no matter what they wore - even completely naked, a high-end mage could wipe out the game's 'Boss' in only a few choice spells. Warriors were wise to keep their PVP flags permanently turned off, lest a stark nekkid mage toddle over and utterly vaporize them before they could so much as close to melee range.
* Many Roguelikes such as ''[[Angband]]'' and the original ''[[PLATO Moria|Moria]]'' (and their many variants) play this straight. Mages are hard classes to keep alive at first, but they become major death dealers by the endgame. Warrior-like classes are fairly easy to keep alive but don't deal as much damage in the endgame.
* The text-based RPG ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131026002234/http://www.skotos.net/games/grendel/ Grendel's Revenge]'' had a rather interesting relationship with this trope through it's history. At first it was inverted, magical monsters were fairly balanced with young fighter monster for the first 50 or so levels, but the fighter monsters could get a host of passive, always on [[Status Buff]]s as well as timed ones from Leader monsters, whereas magical monsters had very few ways to get a status buffs at all. This got progressively worse since fighter monsters could wear better armor, get skills to boost their weapon skills (and the weapons gotten improves) while magical monsters could only wear a small selection of non-armor magical gear. At the 200+ level mark, fights between equal level solo magical and fighter monsters would be very hard for the magical monster's player since their attacks could not penetrate and they had no defense. Only by using sneak tactics like stunning, teleporting enemies into traps (which Builder clan mates had to prepare for the magical monster) and other means could they hold their own...all of which were not that effective against the fighter player to begin with, which ''still'' had very good resistances to these tactics. To make it worse, the maximum number of skills/powers/abilities was capped at '''7''', so magical characters could not get nearly as diverse a power set compared to fighters, and only [[Level Grinding]] to 700 could get you that far. Magical player outcries got so loud and exceedingly ''deconstructive'' (the game forum was for many months ''full'' of dissertations and long arguments on exactly how and why magical monsters had the raw end of the class system) that the designers made a series of wide ranging nerfs, buffs, and rebalances to fix the issue...which sometimes snowballed into creating other imbalances. It's worked, mostly, but the current state of game balance is unknown at this time.
** And ''don't'' get us started on game balance issues involving the non-combat classes!
* Played straight and later [[Inverted Trope|inverted]] in ''[[RuneScape]]''. Melee combat is the cheapest to use (literally requiring no equipment at first), while magic is extremely expensive. Once you've leveled up magic, however, it starts hitting harder and more consistently than melee. Past about level 50, however, melee takes over again as doing the most damage thanks to better weapons. The best magic spells (which allow freezing and leeching hitpoints) allow really good mages to still have the upper hand over warriors, but it takes a lot of skill. Of course, this is in [[PvP]] combat. When fighting NPCs, melee is the best 90% of the time due to the lower cost (cost is much less of a consideration in [[PvP]] as opposed to PvM) and faster speed, though magic does have its niches. Ranged combat falls somewhere in the middle, able to dish out a large amount of power without costing quite as much as magic. Its progression is much more linear, however.
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