Chanter is most desired class. There's a druid or shaman when there's no cleric, but when there's no chanter, everyone sighs since their XP rate just went down. And if there's 2 or 3 chanters, so much the better.
47 shaman, LFG... got to the point i was making my own groups daily rather than waiting for an invite, but shamans can also solo well so it's less of an issue. my hubby is a 52 warrior and has had difficulty getting groups, but for both of us it's partly timing.
How many expansions will the high desire for enchanters last? Will the desire die out after PoP? Never?
Chanters never become a bad group class, but it's never the same as it is now and many classes tanks and healers specifically pass them when it comes to who gets groups quicker. Chanters are already a bad raid class on phinny because they don't stack well and this only becomes worse as buffs last longer. Classic, Kunark and PoP are the 3 expansion in which charm is really strong. The dmg output of charmable mobs doesn't really increase in SoV SoL, but the dmg out put of plays increases significantly, Cheal in classic/kunark is more effective on charm pets due to there massive HP advantage over tanks, this also changes in SoV/SoL as tanks get closer HP but much better mitigation then pets and come PoP forget about it players tank much better. After PoP charm DPS is nerfed hard. C becomes worse, right now C1/2 is like 1/3 or 1/4 of total mana regen and like 90% of standing mana regen. When FT items, AA mana regen, horses and beastlord crack w/o pots becoming avail. C or rather KEI can become something like 10% of total regen, making it much less crucial. Chanter mez becomes less needed. In Classic and Kunark most of your time leveling is spent in cramped dungeons with 5 mobs in tiny rooms and mez is used all the time, without a chanter XP in these zones just isn't nearly as good. This starts to change as the SoV, SoL, PoP ect come out. Then most XP/loot spots start having room to root park, rooms with only 2 mobs rather then 5 making pulls singles much easier and less time consuming, bard mez catches up. Other then a few Zones like Velks and DN the value of chanter mez is just never the same. As far as SK goes, Paladins and Warriors are much better group tanks due to stun/heals and defensive/furious. Warriors are much better raid tanks and Paladins have more roles on raids then SKs do. The thing only thing SKs do better then the other 2 tanks is solo. While SK is a fun class to play they kinda suck.
I disagree about SK sucking. They have decent group utility and especially so when paired with 2 non-snarers to make a 3 person setup. SKs also stack way better on raids. Warriors are a kind of all or nothing with a steep gear curve; a warrior with mediocre raid attendance or simply too many warriors in total doesn't work well. Paladins likewise you just don't need a bunch of them. SKs, on the other hand, are not a piss poor dps joke but a respectable contributor when not literally tanking on a raid. To put it another way - if you are designing the perfect full raid (72) and must take exactly one tank per 6 person group, 12 total, how many of each do you take? Nobody sane says 4 of each; you dump on pals and inflate with SKs here. This argument also holds for enchanters - as godly as they are in groups, if you are again forced to take exactly 12 crowd controllers (1 per group) nobody sane wants 6 enchanters and 6 bards in a raid, you want way more bards.
I'd rather have more pallys than sks, pally at 57 heals for the same as any druid/shaman. It's nice to have those extra group healers for ae stuff like trak.
You want more then a couple of warriors so you always have a couple with furious and defensive up. Paladins have group heals, LOH and cures going forward. When you need them those abilities are just much more important to raid success then an SKs second rate dps. I would personally take 5 warriors 6 pallies and 1 SK HT snap and VoT line once it comes out ...
As many people have previously stated.... Enchanter, Enchanter, Enchanter!!! Must have for groups, amazing soloers, Unmatched utility in raids & groups. The best class there is! Second most desirable is Cleric by a far margin than any other class.
Back in the day Druid was a solid and enjoyable choice for solo and party...but I don't see anyone mentioning Druid here. Are they no longer a desirable class? Would it maybe be in my best interest to restart with a different class?
Druids are pretty good in classic, ok in Kunark but they just get weaker and weaker and weaker. They range from ok-bad at most things but they aren't really good at anything, making them rather undesirable in group content. They can solo, but are not the best at it. Overall they aren't a very strong EQ class and most find them pretty lackluster and unenjoyable through the Velious - POF expansions.
Solo is a lot lower value nowadays. They do have the ability to both track and solo reasonably tough mobs, making one of the best for farming rare spawns. Long term they tend to get kinda rare despite getting buffed into a solid healer class. So tend to always be in pretty high demand, at least for guilds I'm in. And if you do want to play a healer, they aren't as severely-one-dimensional about it as clerics are. They are also the best PL class. Just like all classes it depends how important their strengths and weaknesses are to you personally.
Saying you want a raid-critical, group-critical class that's also fun to play during downtime is definitely a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of request. There are only two classes in your list that will be raid and group-critical into the foreseeable future: Cleric and Shaman. Cleric moreso, and consistently throughout every xpac. Shamans haven't come into their own yet, and they won't ever be quiet as critical as clerics. But shammies also have marginal soloing possibilities, whereas clerics only have them in undead zones. Neither class is known for being particularly fun, and some people really can't get into playing clerics in particular. But I like them both, and think both can be enjoyable. The Enchanter love is way overstated. They won't be top of the pile for long. SK doesn't meet your description, but people bashing the class are wrong. They will be tops DPS for the next couple expansions, at least. Add feign death (huge bonus) plus good survivability, and it's an odd class to pick on.
I couldn't disagree more with comments about druids getting worse and worse, just the opposite is true. Once druids start getting their debuffs for fire and attack, they are hands down the best class to have in a caster centric team. A druid/chanter/mage combo for example, is one of the best in the game, and you could easily argue it is the best combo in the game. Going forward, druid attack debuffs also land on a lot more mobs than slow will (i.e. anything you'd actually really need it to land on), and even when slow does land it starts to become partially mitigated. Besides their contribution to caster heavy groups, the real beauty of the druid class, is the fluid nature of the playstyle. The fact that that can go full DPS , full heal, or anywhere in between on the fly makes them incredibly valuable in a group. The druid may only resort to healing once in a while in a tight spot, but those are usually the difference between a wipe and living through something. The only thing people seem to know about EQ is slow, haste, and mana regen. There are quite a few synergies in the game that are overlooked, or completely ignored. Druids debuffs are surprisingly effective, especially when paired with a fire based casting class. If you *really* want to see a burn phase, but a chanter and a druid with a mage on full burn, you will just melt things. If you enjoy druid, keep playing it. Druid is one of the best classes in the game, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing with it and in the right group makeup. When you need to burn things, druids can help, when you need to heal things, druid can help, when you need to get the hell out of somewhere, druid to the rescue. The fact that it is a jack of all trades class, is exactly the point, it's awesome. Min/max theory crafting about DPS and HPS is all well and good, but in the real world of everquest, where 99.9% of your time is spent grinding something, the adaptable nature of druids is absolutely awesome in a group.
Druids are a nice all round class. My main on Ragefire was a 60 druid and I enjoyed playing one. They can solo. They can port. They have utility. But they're not that desired for groups or raids. They're weak in Kunark, and not really wanted in groups these days, where most people prefer min/max. If you want heals, get a cleric, if you want big nukes, get a wizard, if you want dots, get a necro. They can do all of these things, but are not the best at anything, particularly healing which is very weak in Kunark. They're a handy utility class, but most people don't want that any more. I mostly had to form groups myself to get a group. I even had a few people drop out and go back to /lfg when they realised a druid would be healing. The few times I was lfg and got asked, it was because they couldn't find a cleric. And if anything goes wrong, and someone dies, it takes ages to reform, and usually the group collapses while trying to look for a cleric who'd come rez them. In raids, you might want a couple of druids for FR/CR buff, but mostly, people would prefer a wizard, necro or a cleric. Yes, for the groups that do invite a good druid - you do have someone who'll add a bit of dps, and snare, DS, and some buffage, who can take over healing when the cleric is lom, who can get the group together quickly with ports, who can evac if things get too hairy.... A well played druid is an asset. A well played person of any class is, really. It all changes in Velious - druids get *much* better heals then, and Protection of the Glades, which everyone will want to be buffed with.
I rolled a necro for this server and I'm glad I did. What most people don't realize is that with undead charm and 18 second mez, and pet haste, you can pretty much do everything an enchanter can, in most of the same zones, as well as having FD, dots, snare, lifetaps, lifeflow heals, etc. Group invites are fairly common. They get more common after a group comes down to their desired camp to find you soloing it with a charmed undead mob... Demoncrusher
as a shaman, I love partnering with druids.. they kite and I dot/slow and we get lovely wagon trains going with their snares. sure we're both soloable for the most part as long as we stay out of range(dotx6/malo/root is my friend), but team up and add in a necro... so don't let anyone put you off with playing your druid. most groups aren't perfect and being a class that's adaptable is fantastic.
Ya they can switch between "full dps" and "full healing", but they do neither well. If I was looking for dps I would never take a druid as my first choice. If I was looking for healing I would never take a druid as my first choice. If I was looking to form a group I would never take a druid in an optimal group. You can keep bringing up the druid debuffs but the truth is most group content mobs are not very resistant. Even with no debuffs at all your nukes will land more often then not. I will agree that they aren't useless. They can be decent members in a group or raid, they just are worse at everything they do then another class.
"Optimal groups" are nothing but min/max theory crafting. The real world of EQ really benefits from a class that can both heal and DPS depending on the situation. Wizards are good if you want to burn things, but they become dead when you overpull, get an add, a mez or root is resisted multiple times etc. Healing is valuable, even in a group with a cleric I love having a druid as a backup. This is especially true on a tough pull where the cleric is casting super long heal spells to keep the main tank up, as the druid can keep other classes healed. You don't value a class that can both DPS and Heal, I do. /shrug. My "optimal" group, will always include a druid, for several reasons. The druid debuffs have absolutely nothing to do with things landing on mobs. They are combo debuffs that debuff attack and make mobs susceptible to fire damage. It's a damage increase for players, and a damage decrease from the mobs. I'm am constantly surprised by how few people actually understand how much these debuffs do. I spent years doing nothing but trying different combos of classes and parsing the results. Go hop on test and try for yourself. Put a chanter, 3 wiz, a tank and cleric merc together and parse the results. Now sub a druid for one of the wizards. The groups DPS will be higher, and you get the bonus of a class that can heal in a pinch. This doesn't even take into account the attack debuffs, which land on more mobs than slow does, and mitigate about the same amount of damage. Once you get into black wolf territory, it becomes outright silly damage increase. I'm not sure why it is that people are not wise to the druid attack debuffs. They are highly effective in a lot of situations, and especially situations where slow won't land, the mobs are outright immune to it, or further on in game always partially negated. They are the best class in the game at being able to both DPS and Heal. Both of those elements continue to get better as expansions unlock. Druid is a class that goes from pretty good in classic, to amazing down the road. It's a shame so many people don't understand what this class can actually do for a group. It's not what the druid does on their own individual parse, it's what the druid does for caster group DPS that's the point, combined with the off heals. Your assertion, is like saying that bards have horrible DPS, their heals are weak, and their CC is too short. /shrug. People will keep bagging on druids, no skin off my nose. I love the class and will always actively try and group with one. I almost always have one on a box team, as they are irreplaceable in terms of value for group slot taken up.
