My Fire Mage is an awesome swordsman?

I just feel that way man, no need to rationalize everything... theres a bit of irrational when you talk about building a world... its not a kitchen or a starship ^^

 

I think the way to introduce classes is through the equivalent of dojos. Every dojo has it's own unique way of fighting so if you say a player is using the butterfly or swallow technique then you know he/she trained in a specific dojo. Training in a dojo should come with some bonuses and just like attunement those bonuses may conflict with those of another school.

And this would be purely voluntary on the player's part.

 

I don't really care what Gandalf, Lady Galadriel, Raistlin, etc. did. In New Britannia NPC mages attack me all the time. I want to be able to fight back

 

And the NPC mages seem to have the special abilites of doing more damage to you than you could ever do with the very same staff you take from them and to initiate Benny Hill esque chasing scenes once they start running. The mages and the archers of this world would make a fine football team with the patterns they run.

 

Thanks for all the feedback, I think everyone can agree that all skills need quite a bit of rebalancing and in some cases perhaps more abilities added in order to make them viable for a pure build as well as hybrid builds. I asked some questions pertaining to this for the R23 postmortem and hopefully we will receive some feedback. Also someone had mentioned the lack of mage specific gear, I could not agree more. I think it would be really cool to have armor such as robes and weapons that can be skill or skill tree specific, like a wand that increases fire ball damage by whatever %.