Ah, sweet, delightful, utterly-minmaxable, classless RPG's, lending themselves to an endless cavalcade of character configurations, yet ultimately resulting in the greatest degree of homongeneity.
"Just imagine, we can all be as unique and varied as snowflakes!"
"Then why do we keep seeing the same handful of builds everywhere?"
"Because those are the optimal builds, silly. See, this isn't like a big dinner buffet where I like chicken fingers and you like ham, so we pick different things. This is a buffet of quantifiables, and after a short evaluation period, people come to a consensus on the best choices."
All facetiousness aside, I played Asheron's Call for several years. It was a classless RPG where you bought skills with points. I was a rare breed indeed, specialized in spears, a weapon group largely overlooked. People would see me and be like "hey, I forgot they had spears in this game". Boy, did I suck. Without Life Magic--which EVERYONE else wound up getting--I had to stick to hunting the relatively few monsters that didn't use elemental attacks (without the proper resistance spells, such attacks would one-or-two-shot me). And since I specialized in a little-used weapon, it wasn't like the developers were in the same rush to create uber-spear quests that they were in to create uber-sword quests. But I never re-rolled. I figured that I'd be more miserable from being homogeneous than from sucking. I did have a lot of fun exploring Derlith and finding ways to work within my limitations, but I'll probably never put myself through such a thing again.
