Will make WAY more sense in context, and since this is an OLD mud (20 years ago?) likely no one will remember it.
Once upon a time, a guy really liked the concept of "godwars" but he REALLY hated the codebase and the way it had evolved so he made his own, from scratch, using merc.
The classes he designed were ALL unique to the mud and interacted quite strongly.
Saiyans developed their ki, fired long range ki blasts (from other rooms), went super saiyan, but had to recharge ki during battle and would often spend rounds of prep for their major skills.
Fists worked on a combo system where nothing was static. Punches, kicks, elbows, knees were the "core" and each would add "3-4", "4-5", "5-7", etc "points" (note: NEVER a fixed number) of combo points, which they could then release for a massive effect (5 rounds worth of damage, or a 2 round stun or whatever...) The interraction here is that if you "kept count" of their combo (there was no text but you knew everything they've done) you could guess (oh it will be a fire attack, fire shield) and if right completely negate the attack, or disrupt it (he's on 18 and about to release, I'll die, if I use a count reducer to bring him to 17 he'll get nothing)
I liked both of these classes, but this post isn't about those classes, you just need to understand how the pvp (which WAS the game) in the game worked to understand why the class I liked was so ridiculous.
The class I'm talking about is the patryn. They were explicitly designed to be "the reactive class". They had a shield for every element that would COMPLETELY negate the damage of that element. They had a count reducer for fists, they could burn ki from saiyans, they could straight up reflect spells from sorcerers if they could predict their next move... but the advantages from these predictions were the ONLY way they were designed to win. On paper they were straight up weaker than any other class in pvp. This even extended to patryn v. patryn combat. Whoever shielded the most effectively won.
Pretty cool right? But wait! There's more. The core "progression" of patryns was tattooing their bodies, but their was a limited amount of skin to work with. Go all water everywhere and you might have an 80% dodge rate and parry 50% of attacks but you'd have 30% accuracy, hit for vanilla, and attack 1 time per round. There was no "best build" and in fact two patryns could fight with COMPLETELY different styles in pvp (to the extent they seemed like fighting two completely different classes) based entirely on their tattoo arrangement. Which was both "hidden information", and mutable (you could always redo your tats). Since this was a game of reactive pvp this effectively meant almost any tat layout could be good until people knew what it was, then it became worthless.
To this day I consider it the best designed class I've ever played in any game.