There is, of course, another EQ expansion on the way. I can almost remember back after the first one had been released around three and a half years ago, and Verant’s attitude was “Eh, we *might* make another one…” Of course if I had a cash cow like that I’d milk the hell out of it too.
There hasn’t been an official announcement, so for now there’s just rumour, speculation, and a few tidbits discovered in the test code. There will be new zones and spells, as always, some new alternate advancement skills, and the addition of a new class: the Berserker.
Managing classes is a tricky business. The things players do in these games really boils down to one of three areas: Healing, Hurting, and Helping. Thus all you really need are three classes, one to handle each area. That’s a little boring though, so to add some variety you can subdivide and overlap the areas a bit. Hurting can be done through toe-to-toe melee, spells, or minions, which can be separated out into the Warrior, Wizard, and Mage. Take a Warrior and reduce his ‘hurting’ ability a bit, but add a bit of ‘healing,’ and you’ve got a Paladin. Or mix the melee and spell ‘hurting’ abilities and you’ve got a Shadow Knight. The problems are, you have to make each class sufficiently different that they’re not copying each other too much, each class has to be useful for something so that people want to play them, and they have to be relatively equal in power (‘balanced’) so that people aren’t too jealous of each others’ power. There wouldn’t be much point to playing a Warrior if a Paladin could do everything the warrior could do and more.
It’s not clear yet what kind of class the Berserker will be, but just from the sounds of it it’ll probably be a melee damager primarily, maybe with some special skills of some kind. They have to do something to make it different enough from the other classes to make it interesting, though.