I'm curious about folks' various experience across servers and guilds: what are the classes that your guild tends to have an "excess" of? On the other side of that coin, what are the classes that you're pretty much always on the lookout for and needing? Mainly referring to raiding settings, but to a lesser extent grouping guilds as well. I realize it's a bit subjective as things class stacking, flavor classes of the month, expansion content, class populations based on things like game history, and numerous other factors play into it (feel free to share), so it's more just a general question for entertainment and/or informational purposes on a Friday (and not looking to start derp forum wars). And yes, absolutely a good player is valuable regardless of the class they chose, so am not trying to imply otherwise, just curious if the trends that I see are server/situation specific, or more general to the game as a whole. For my part, we're pretty much always looking for Shaman, Paladins, Berserkers and Beastlords. I can't recall a time we were closed to those classes in recent memory. The opposite is often true for Rangers, Shadowknights, Warriors and Monks. You?
We're almost always on the lookout and needing bards and berserkers, very frequently beastlords as well. Luclin is nearly overrun with knights, monks and rangers.
Can never have too many clerics, bards, or berserkers. IL is very very tank heavy. I'm talking about a consistent 5-8 warriors every night, 3-4 SKs and 4-5 pallies. It's like tank overload at times Against all odds, IL is the only guild I've ever been in where there isn't a stupid amount of rangers around.
Interestingly what made me post this is I was helping some folks out of guild with a raid the other night on an alt. There were *9* rangers in the raid, and I totally and involuntarily cringed. My guild's never been crazy ranger heavy either, but it made me think wow, each guild's roster varies a lot! The other reason is that we tend to be tank heavy, too, but only with War/SK
We are always in need of a few rangers. We could use 1 of mage, berserker, bard, and druid. The Beastpack rolls dirty in RotE.
I think the 17 year long history of what classes are most fun to play in the group game reflect heavily on demand inside of raid guilds. Bards lack some of the fun factor in the group game. As a result there are very few to recruit to raiding. Shadow knight on the other hand have been fun for years on end for groupers. Coupled with their lack of raid utility makes it so they seem to always be in excess.
Absolutely agree - the more powerful/fun group content classes end up being overly represented on most raid rosters, and vice versa with the opposite side of the isle, from what I've seen.
no guild ever closes recruitment for clerics soport classes are allways in demand (shammy,bards, bsties, echies) been up and down alot in our guild for the longest time we dont open up for tanks very often (we keep about 3 of eatch of the tank classes in the raid)
In SR: Lots of tanks, lots of clerics, druids. Lots of rangers and melee DPS. Low # of casters, especially mage. Low bards. FL (open raid): Lots of tanks, sometimes more than I can put in my ETW (13+4 in my group). Lots of rangers. Low bards and low caster DPS.
Just pick whatever class is least popular to play and that's the one that is in short supply a whole bunch of times outa 10.
In my experience I'd probably say Enchanters, Druids (surprised to include this one, but there seem to be an increasing number of guilds that lack Druids recently), Bards, and Clerics. While there are some shifts in recruitment of DPS classes based on the flavor of the month, it seems to depend more on the specific needs of the guild for those classes. DPS, even when some classes are better than others, are largely interchangeable so there isn't necessarily the same degree of need as some other roles have. Tanks are definitely integral to raiding (especially warriors), but there generally seems to be more available tanks than, for example, clerics. As far as classes that are in excess, that generally happens in lower end guilds. I've seen guilds have rather excessive numbers of Rangers and Mages, among others.
I always thought it would be fun if guilds could trade players, like in professional sports. I will trade you this max level/AA/raid geared cleric for your 105 ranger, a 101 berserker, and a 2017 Heroic bard... and I will throw in two Kronos as well.
In my guild that has completed tbm and all cheevs, our most prevalent class by far is Rangers. We average 5-10 every raid. Luckily most are pretty good. On the flip side we never have enough shamans. Couple that with being a melee heavy guild, and you get too many melee without proper ADPS a lot of times. Mages also seem to be falling off a bit on raids lately for obvious reasons.
A few years ago it seemed the Luclin server was really short on raid clerics. I thought at the time it would be really interesting for the clerics to band together in their own guild and then rent their services out to the various raiding guilds! This would actually emulate modern trade unions to some degree. On-topic: Regarding the OP, I don't have any special insight although it would be really fun to see DBG statistics on server transfers for the various classes. And how many people main-change for raiding purposes? Off-topic: I sincerely appreciate the tank-heavy aspect of my guild (Inverse Logic)! It buys a certain relief for the healers when the tank rotation is solid like a machine.
My experience on my server and guilds I am in or the balance of my friends guilds is the following: Always in demand: bard Nice to have and usually scarce: beastlord Usually in demand, but sometimes plagued by skill issues when you should have enough: cleric, shaman, enchanter. DPS in general have been pretty interchangeable, though with more emphasis on getting casters due to lack of melee support classes. Almost always in excess: all 3 tanks, rangers, monks. I have seen 9+ rangers, monks, warriors and paladins in my raid for extended periods.
Good paladins are really hard to find. Paladins that love roleplaying, have crappy reaction speeds, an inability to understand instructions, and have no clue on how to play EQ are much more common.
