It’s not that the cleric can’t easily outperform the merc. It’s that the improved healing of the cleric isn’t really necessary or even that helpful. The game is tuned for mercs to heal fine for group geared players. If you have better than group gear it becomes easy on the merc. If you’re doing anything other than the hardest content, mercs also can easily overheal.. making clerics not needed or helpful.
How about an event that changes things up a bit. Damage spells heal the main tank. Healing spells generate agro. Agro discs and abilities do damage. Personally I think it'd be fun to have wizzys and zerkers play healer, clerics, druids, and shammys tank, and tanks be dps.
If you cannot get grps as a real cleric, you should look into mirror and ask yourself what you do wrong or ask people who say no to you, why do you not wanna grp with me and then start working with it. Mercs not the problem, you are.
For next expansion, I'd really like to see an in-game web browser with direct access to view and post on the EQ forums, so that we could check patch notes, report bugs, and stay up-to-date on the latest info for the game. ForumQuest while we Everquest in a seamlessly integrated experience never before seen in our age. Also, artificial closing of the skill gap through consolidation and simplification. It's mindblowing how wide the gap has become, even among the top performers. With a dwindling population, it's become nearly impossible to properly create and balance content with both groups in mind.
I haven't gone back and done the BiC (I was away from the game for both GoD and OoW at the time), but I'm also still working toward getting 350 in all skills. I'm a very casual player, except in the summer's when I'm not teaching, so building up that many AAs to raise the caps to 350 is huge barrier even before I begin working on gathering all the materials to learn enough recipes. (Because I'm obsessive like that, I did the math, and I'm wishing that I didn't. Getting all the basic 7 crafting skills caps raised to 350 costs 2975 AA points. That's more than I've earned ever, on my Wizard, aside from auto-grant. I get that the AP is really good even before you get anything past 300, but man is that a lot of AA to spend on tradeskills.) What I'm trying to say is that I don't need another "mother of all tradeskill quests" to add to my list. Now, I wouldn't deny such a thing to those that already have gotten the Artisan's Prize, Shawl 3.0, etc. and are ready for the next, but I would like to see more TS quests that aren't "best in slot or bust!" The Crestra's earring series is a decent model since you can either upgrade it with drops you get as you progress through RoS grouping, or by buying the drops in the bazaar.
I have two cents to throw in about healer mercs and healers in general. I agree that a real cleric is far superior to a healer merc when played even decently well. So that isn't a problem, in my eyes, as long as the healer mercs are "sufficient", however you define that. What I would like to see is more balance between healers, and more ability of different healers to 'stack' their strengths. In older EQ (The Vision (TM)), the reasoning for clerics to be the best healers, by a long ways, was that druids and shaman had other powerful abilities and versatility that clerics lacked. Druids could solo and do respectable damage and had ports. Shaman could slow, which was very powerful at the time, provide melee enhancement buffs, debuff the mobs in other ways, and do damage with their DoTs. Clerics could heal the best (Complete Heal chains ftw in raids!) and had the best HP/AC buffs. I think that the issue with healer mercs isn't that they compete with clerics for a healing slot in a group, but that they compete with druids and shaman. It is a problem, from a game design perspective, for a healer merc to be more effective as a main healer than a druid or shaman. IMHO, this is what needs to be addressed. Also, as a side note, the shaman hp buffs (focus) stacks with cleric hp buffs, so maybe there should be more of a reason to have the druid hp buff. It used to be that people would sometimes want a druid hp first, then get cleric symbol from a cleric or merc, but I don't see people bothering with that anymore. Maybe it's just not enough of a difference to be worth the effort. Perhaps the druid buff could be improved to make that more worthwhile again.
More debuff/dot spots on NPC! Fresh spell lines, new AAs (not copies and paste), fresh content again not copied and pasted. Quests, quest and more quests with unique rewards. ie, illusions, mounts, clickies. But alas no chance of new spells or AAs as we have a level increase. Would have prefered more content than more levels. I just hope they remember how many spells each class require and adjust the spell rune drops accorningly. RoS was horrid for getting rank 2 and 3 spells.
mercenaries are not even remotely close to the effectiveness of either shm or druid healers. Druids may prefer to work along side a mercenary so's to spend nearly all their time on dps instead, but that just speaks to their strength in that other role, not some weakness in healing.
The Luclin models could be better, but I really don't have the hate for them people seem to. If I had to choose between new content or new character models, I would pick new content every time. Similarly, people riot when they revamp existing zones. There is no such thing as a "respectful revamp" with this community. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth and shouts of betrayal and all the worst drama we've all come to expect. Personally, though, I would fully support revamped older zones with content appropriate for current levels, but I don't think it's that easy, especially with the TLPs. My understanding is a change to Kithicor on Live would also have to be a change to Kithicor on all servers. Maybe do something like Seeds of Destruction and other expansions have where the revamped old zone is a different zone or something, but that's fundamentally no different from entirely new zones if the concern is not spreading out the world even more.
The 'issue' with healer merc's vs clerics getting groups isn't so much the merc's fault as the groups. Mercs provide adequate healing while also not wanting any loot vs a live cleric who provides vastly superior healing but may also want loot. It's not really a merc issue, or a cleric issue but simply a greed issue. Now, if a live cleric had something (don't ask me what) that would make groups want them over a merc despite the fact that they may want loot, that would be great. It would be nice to see clerics able to get groups and not be restricted to basically being 'raiding only' characters'.
A large segment of players out there don't understand what individual classes can do, and cleric's for the most part are represented by mercenaries. So, by having the cleric mercenary be crap that leads to players associating real clerics to merc clerics and picking another class or just using 2 mercs.
Goal Provide considerate way to get new and mid level players to top end so they can group with the rest of the players that is not overly easy Problems 85 to 100 is a slog to solo. Not enough players group at this range because game is top heavy Suggestions Extend defiant gearing through 85 to 100 Make J5 merc viable beyond 85 so players can continue to molo Provide alternate methods of experience for those who solo (perhaps a solo HA, increased teek exp, etc) Extend TSS hero Journey to 95/100 Provide means to improve Mercs sooner. Allow 2 mercs until a specific level. Provide form of scaling and/or incentive for high levels to revisit the older zones to increase grouping options. Provide improved grouping tool to help players find others easier Retune older zones for those leveling (perhaps a reverse heritage). Change mob HP pools in the 85 to 100 zones. They are mostly empty anyway Increase Heroic from 85 to 95. Create a new tutorial instance for new heroic to ease them into high level character play Remarks I love this game as it's a great D&D 3D online game. Levels 1 to 60 are reasonable but becomes unreasonable after that point especially given that 85 to 100 (and I use level 100 loosely to make a point) is no longer current content and most people who start want to see the end game but not take a year to do it. You did this once with TSS where leveling was redone. It hasnt been revisited since but the max level has increased creating the same issue TSS solved. 1 to 60ish is fun. 70ish to 90/95 is not. It should be addressed.
My cleric gets groups a lot, people like live healers. I spend more time LFG on my bst then I do on my cleric.
Maybe it's just an error of perception on my part, then. I'll leave it to people with more experience playing druids and shaman to comment.
It depends on the player to be honest. I have played with people a cleric merc beats hands down. We all probably have, but like I said before mercs don't use Auras so a real player has a benefit there and if they are not using them you can tell them to cast them. They probably also don't stand between you and the mob your fighting so they get hit non stop or for some reason run to the other end of the zone. You can also try and educate a player vs a merc resulting in better play.
