Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Pretty much anything from EQ, most notably though Enchanters, Bards, and Warriors.

Warriors?!

at worst it was make a /sit and/beg macro taunt. Warriors would fall asleep during raids once they got mobs positioned.

But yeah when I frist saw the topic I thought "EQ1 enchanter with a Ranger in the group"

Then again the canni dance did get mind numbing which was a level of difficulty in itself...

Lineage 2 BIshop. 

Herding in Ultima Online.  It was fun herding 50-100 animals into brit to congest the roads at primetime.

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Originally posted by teakbois
The most difficut class to play well might have been an EQ Bard.

Enchanter is certainly difficult, and is perhaps the most stressful

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Bards never had "downtime", per se. We had songs we had to play to assist the group recover between fights, so the twisting kept on going. We needed to be aware of what was happening so our songs would be the best help. AND do our best to keep in the fight with our swords :)

I do feel for the EQ enchanters, though. Inevitably, someone broke the CC and ZIP! ZING! Mobs on the enchanter! (I ashamedly did this a few times myself before learning no AoEs!)

AO - Bureaucrat, but later MP joined them and probably passed them

Healer in DaoC if you actually tried to maximize your possibilities between CC and healing, you could really be nonstop casting and controlling and swaying a battlefield singlehandedly.

If hard means gimped, Cata WoW Resto Shamans doing PVE soloing would be my pick.  It couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag at low levels.  At least not for me.  One of the only toons I deleted as "not worth the hassle".

Most classes in WoW on 2500+ arena level. Especially mage, rogue, hunter, warlock and priest.

Also melee classes in AoC take quite a while to master.

Any classes in PvE MMOs are easy mode. 

Originally posted by Vannor

I'd say any 'pure' class in Asheron's Call, in it's earlier days. Such as going pure warrior, pure life or pure bow. If you didn't come up with varied build across multiple specialties, making sure you had a few magic schools in there, you were in for a tough time.

I agree with this one also,

I never liked the idea of being a warrior or an archer while also using magic at the time.

my  pure archer was a bitch to play,but it was fun.

Originally posted by Hauvarn

Early WotLK ret pally

Wait wasnt it the time when ret pally was terribly OP or am I mistaken :)

Uh..by difficult, do you mean control-intensive (lots of keyclicks and attention to minutae required), or greatest gap above/beyond basic-skills to 'master'.

Two different answers, I'm afraid.  (EQ enchanter not being either of them :P)

Speaking of bards, imagine a class where actual performing was sometimes required (by peer pressure, if nothing else)?  Does that kind of difficulty 'count'?

Tabula Rasa - Exobiologist.

Not so bad to play at release...but just try playing one now...impossible!

With Rift Soul system you can some really hard comb or just stupid.

Any Class in Anarchy Online is hard if you don't know how to twink your character. My first class was Trader which really alot on twinking to get better weapons on but I was a noob and like every noob I didnt knew that to Play AO you need a calc, 2-3 Database, implant planner software, a list of what Buff stacks with what... And some other stuffs I cant remember. Maybe that why I took 1,5 years to get my Character to level 220 :)

Originally posted by ZoeMcCloskey

AO - Bureaucrat, but later MP joined them and probably passed them

Healer in DaoC if you actually tried to maximize your possibilities between CC and healing, you could really be nonstop casting and controlling and swaying a battlefield singlehandedly.

If you wanna talk Ao class...MP or engi before the pet fixes right around Notum wars. They were basically unplayable.

Or fixers before grid armor.

Originally posted by ChicagoCub

Tabula Rasa - Exobiologist.

Not so bad to play at release...but just try playing one now...impossible!

Sorry for the double post but uh....I'm almost entirely sure EVERY class in TR is impossible to play now, on virtue of the entire game not existing anymore.

Originally posted by terrant

Sorry for the double post but uh....I'm almost entirely sure EVERY class in TR is impossible to play now, on virtue of the entire game not existing anymore.

Game's dead.  Really barely a footnote, in terms of MMO History.

Bard/ Druid in Rift.

wow so crappy, that it takes skill to be decent at.

Originally posted by Kwansei

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Pretty much anything from EQ, most notably though Enchanters, Bards, and Warriors.

Warriors?!

at worst it was make a /sit and/beg macro taunt. Warriors would fall asleep during raids once they got mobs positioned.

 

But yeah when I frist saw the topic I thought "EQ1 enchanter with a Ranger in the group"

Then again the canni dance did get mind numbing which was a level of difficulty in itself...

We had our warrior go afk for 45 minutes to pick up his daughter from school while tanking in Ssra Temple. I'd have to agree it was the most straight forward class in EQ, standing in the right spot and turning appropriately was basically the criteria for being a good tank.

However, it's mind boggling to see some of the classes here being considered difficult to play after EQ Bard was already mentioned. While I never played one as a serious main, and I'm not much of a fan, playing a bard well required more micro management and manual dexterity than any other class I've ever seen in any MMO of the past 15 years.

Rangers in EQ get an honorable mention as the difference between a good ranger and an OK ranger was gigantic, it was a delicate class and glass cannon that was capable of pulling off some hard to do CC and fight manipulation, but literally one step too far in the wrong direction or over aggroing for a second, or mistiming a recast often resulted in one shot scenarios if you were doing anything worthwhile. The amount of finesse required to make that class shine blew away anything I've seen in a long time. 

While I liked some of the other games mentioned here, some of them a hell of a lot for awhile, it's absolutely laughable to put any class from WAR, Rift and WoW up here. If that's your only basis for comparison it's understandable, but while WoW had fantastic combat, I loved WARs PvP, and Rift had some potential as far as character building went, the class designs were incredibly basic and intentionally simplistic ('easy to learn, hard to master' ring a bell? This isn't just me hating on all the WoW clones, I played all of them and often, they just weren't very complex in comparison (sure there were complexities whithin most classes for all of those games, but when compared to some of the most difficult, multifaceted and deep classes in MMO history, they're just not on the same level).

I saw AO on the list and I'd agree with some of those classes as well, some were incredibly complex and an actual challenge to play well.

Originally posted by ChicagoCub

Tabula Rasa - Exobiologist.

Not so bad to play at release...but just try playing one now...impossible!

I, too, will flagrantly miss the point of this thread and cite the Ranger in Uncharted Waters Online.  It requires Biology 15 and Ecological Research 13 in order to pull the quest, and it has a huge number of other high rank quests as prerequisites.  So basically, hardly anyone can get access to the class, and those few who can don't need it.

Originally posted by Indol

Building Storm Stormcaller in Rift back when Building Storm was a skill.

 

The optimal rotation was pretty ridiculous involving a ton of toggles and complicated rotations that changed on the fly. On top of that it was impossible to macro 90% of it.

 

Rift wasn't a difficult game by any stretch of the imagination but that Stormcaller build was maddening to use properly.

Oh yeah, I remember that spec. Hated it because it was only good at AOE and it simply took way too long to ramp up your dps. Prefered the newer Storm/Pyro spec. Sure it was easier but at least it was more viable.

In Rift I found my Senticar spec to be quite difficult to play. It's basically a raid healing spec, that actually have good single target heals & sustainability. Really worked well in those 10-man raid settings, since a lot of the bosses could be handle with 2 good healers. The difficulty came from having to heal everyone, whilst keep track of my convictions (a resource required to actually raid heal and needs constant refreshing by damaging enemies).

For this question I will pick my most masochistic experience in gameplay...that being trying to make a Dark Templar work in Age of Conan PvP just post launch.

Talk about frustrating.  Unable to DPS through a healing pot on a clothie then getting blown up by a healer in a matter of seconds.

That was brutal.