Archtypes? but what about prestige classes?

[TheAlicornSage]

I would love to see prestige classes. Sure EK was made into a tree, and some epic thing is named after the shadowdancer, but they aren't the same by any means and there are a lot of other prestige classes that could be added, like dragon disciple and mystic theurge and the actual showdancer with summoned shadows.

[Pandjed]

Marked some sentences.

Why Archetypes?

There are a lot of great reasons to go this route, and we'd love to talk through some of them to help explain why we're angling in this direction.

1: Making new classes is hard - both technically and design-wise. There are only so many D&D classes in the books and the ones that are left retread old ground considerably. We'd never be able to make Class 16 without significant overlap with existing character options, something that feels bad from a design perspective and worse from a player perspective. Tons of great design space is locked up already and we needed a way to go back and fill in our gaps.
2: Technically speaking, this is a lot better than making new classes for a lot of reasons due to how DDO's engine functions. There's a ton of work to get a new class up on the LFM panel, for example, that with Archetypes we simply do not need to do. It prevents our UI from becoming bloated in a variety of places. It also prevents player information overload - rather than having 30 classes, sticking to our current 15 means they're still easily recognizable at a glance UI-wise.
3: This allows us to revisit design space that our existing classes touch upon and give it the love it deserves. If an existing class sorta-supports an archetype, this is a way for us to build that idea out and give it support in a way that doesn't mess with existing builds and archetypes.
4: Archetypes are easier for us to build than regular classes which means we can release more of them more frequently. It also means that we can do weirder things with them - if our ideas don't pan out, design-wise, we're not wasting years of work on a risky idea that doesn't land. We can take more risks, which feels great for us and will likely turn out some insane and unbelievable results.
5: Archetypes give us a great way to schedule revamps and retooling of existing class features. We have historically had a hard time pinning revamps down to a set schedule, but this gives us a great way to order and organize our class initiatives. For example, (and we're going into this later down in this post), Dark Apostate releases alongside a revamp of Divine Disciple. If we're building a Archetype, that's a great time to shore up other parts of the class we're building on - since it all fits together into one cohesive whole.
6: Archetypes are an experiment to see if they resonate better with the players than new Universal Trees do. Universal trees are a struggle to design because they need to appeal universally across many builds - and these are the exact opposite. We want to build narrow, flavorful, high-impact and interesting options that players can choose from, compared to Universal Trees that everyone can access on top of an existing class split. This definitely isn't to say that we won't ever make more Universal Trees, but for right now we're trying this new direction to see if it lands better.

Personally: Prestige Classes are among the worst things 3e ever produced, which is why even Pathfinder, who took that system and polished it to not look as bad, decided to abandon them pretty fast in favor for... archetypes. Why? Because other than in 3e, Pathfinder 1 classes didn't need a prestige class upgrade to stay valid.
Prestige classes would be horrid to balance, a pain to create and design, and provide nothing of value, unless you think "but it was in 3e!" alone is a valid argument.
Baking prestige classes into class trees, universal trees, and epic destinies was exactly the right move, and opening another jar of "things that needs to be balanced to work around all types of builds only to get either totally underpowered or overpowered at first and nerfed into oblivion later" doesn't seem like a smart idea.

[Aelonwy]

Personally, I love 3E prestige classes and they were part of the reason I purchased and collected so many of the 3/3.5 E books. But to each their own I guess.

[TheAlicornSage]

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Personally: Prestige Classes are among the worst things 3e ever produced, which is why even Pathfinder, who took that system and polished it to not look as bad, decided to abandon them pretty fast in favor for... archetypes. Why? Because other than in 3e, Pathfinder 1 classes didn't need a prestige class upgrade to stay valid.
Prestige classes would be horrid to balance, a pain to create and design, and provide nothing of value, unless you think "but it was in 3e!" alone is a valid argument.
Baking prestige classes into class trees, universal trees, and epic destinies was exactly the right move, and opening another jar of "things that needs to be balanced to work around all types of builds only to get either totally underpowered or overpowered at first and nerfed into oblivion later" doesn't seem like a smart idea.

For the page you quoted, seems like a reasonable answer, except for point 1 which is a load bologna.

I disagree about prestige classes. I think they were great, and had nothing to do with keeping characters valid. That said, the only people who had issues with keeping characters valid in 3.x were people who "played the rules" rather than "playing the game." And 3e was designed for those who play the game, NOT those who play the rules. It was 4e that shifted the focus to playing the rules, and 5e that refined playing the rules. As 3e was not about playing the rules, it is not right to judge it by those standards.

And frankly, many of the prestige classes add several abilities that aren't in ddo.

Dragon disciple, mystic theurge, and shadowdancer are three that come to mind. Still can't summon shadows or short range teleport, and mystic theurge nets high level wizard and cleric spells, and dragon disciple nearly turns you into a dragon.

These things are worthwhile additions to 3e and would have been good to add to ddo.

I don't like archetypes because though they add stuff, they do at the expense of losing other stuff. They basically add a new class but then if you take it, you get denied another class just because they are similar. That concept is one that I just don't like. Maybe it's because I never pick a class to stick to, but rather try to pick a variety of classes to get the individual elements I want for my characters.