Necromancer - How good are they?

A well played necro destroys on early game parses. They can easily pull #1 on Vox, Phinny, Inny. CT is a little hit or miss due to resists. Naggy is a wash. Kunark is similar, if it resists fire meh, anything else you can be #1 if you know what you are doing. Velious they really start to shine. If you don't top the parse on Vulak I don't really know what to tell you. I never bothered to feed mana, everything died so I guess the clerics didn't really need that extra mana. (Okay, I occasionally fed on AoW, but only because I couldn't land much anyway.) PoP they do drop off.

Lifetapping is key on early parses. If all you do is stack your dots you're not going to be anywhere. Stack fire and magic dots and lifetap, lifetap, lifetap. Disease and poison are just going to get resisted and cost you 20% of your mana. Get dot trackers on Gina to maximize your uptime. Try to keep your mana even with the mobs health. Toss in an FD every now and again and no one can touch you.

That is a problem at times for other necros. I keep the clerics on my extended target so I can see thier mana. I would rather keep the clerics' mana even with the mobs health then my own. What's my mana gonna do if the healers can't keep the tank alive? Everyone plays differently and focus on different things. There are times in Kunark and Velious and PoP that feeding mana does come into play until your clerics are better geared. But after that you can become the death machine you dreamed of.

Or you can always be the death machine and let the clerics manage their own mana. Literally never lost a fight, early or late in an expansion, because I didn't feed mana. They'll figure it out, and your mana is better used murdering the mob than giving a cleric maybe 1 more heal and then having them end the fight at 20% mana so they never really needed it anyway. End the fight faster and they won't need the one heal your mana gave them.

There were times, especially early in the expansion when melee still had to dodge, that my necro did 10% of the over all dmg on Vulak. Trading 10% of the mob's health in dmg for 4 or 5 complete heals is the worst trade off ever and a horrible way to utilize a necro. Bad necros feed mana when they could be doing damage.

They go from S tier in classic-Velious, to B in Luclin, down to D in PoP. Literally every dot a necro has in PoP is less damage per tick than a Shaman's poison and disease dot alone. They get better moving forward but could use a boost from PoP-GoD eras.

If you're only looking at the dots you're missing part of the equation which is the taps and nukes.

There are so many metrics that can determine whether a necro is good or not. What kind of dot uptime are you talking about? The order you layer your dots is important, sometimes refreshing certain dots isn't optimal etc. How many casts per minute? Are they utilizing clickies properly, are they using burns correctly. Are they using the right gear? I have seen necros bid crazy amounts of dkp on tank items (I mean seriously wtf).

If you're not optimizing every single thing you can then yeah its not the class that is D tier, its the player driving.

Its like every other class in this game. You have to know what you're doing. You have to know how to react moment by moment and make the optimal choice each time and that only comes from experience. What makes necro challenging is its like a juggling act. You have to keep the right dots up at the right time while dealing with your pet, reacting to game mechanics, managing your mana, always be casting something if you're not casting you're doing it wrong.

Most people are lazy. They want the most reward for the least effort. Then there is the kind of person who plays a necro at a high level. They are the kind of weird person who wants their reward to be proportional to the effort. Thats why you see so many diverging opinions on necros. The elite necros are happy with the class and the results they get from it. Other necros want least effort and max output, they should play another class imo.

So like everything with necros, the answer to how good are they depends. It depends on the player driving.

It doesn't matter how much you optimize. This is an idealist fantasy.

EQ is a dirt simple, 23 year old game. There is a decent knowledge burden which allows for some skill expression, but thinking that you can overcome class deficiencies by being "good" is a good way to end up disappointed.

There's a reason there's only like 3 Wizards on the entire server during the 70s era.