Some friends and I are rolling up some heroics to get another friend hooked playing. Because I am late to the party the first 3 classes are set as WAR/ENC/CLR. No one cares what I add (I could add another CLR if I wanted to) as this should be us finding new ways to train each other and generally negate most progress on any given night. That being said, I have narrowed my choices down to rogue, ranger, zerker, wizard or druid. I suppose I wouldn't be totally against necro and/or beastlord. I have kind of adopted mage as the only pet class that exists. In that we actually want to kill stuff, DPS is a factor here, but also fun factor. I've never played any of those classes above L60ish. Oh, and whatever it is will have to be short. Gnomes, obviously, are the best -- so wiz and rogue get bonus points. Halflings are a distant 2nd, so rangers and druids get mild bonus points. Dwarven zerker could be okay. Zerker actually gets a few extra points for face melting, but dwarf kind of kills it. If gnomes could be zerkers, we don't have this conversation.
I would say druid or wizard for ports / evacs when things get dicey (just mem the self evac one and say, oops the spell must have left you all behind to die) Halfling druid does get an xp bonus so you will level slightly faster than your friends so you could rub it in that they are slow pokes.
What Yruc said. Druid or wizzy for ports/evac. Druid gets bonus points for track, if that's something you'd find useful.
How face-melty can druids get? I'm concerned with WAR/ENC/CLR we are lacking in the melting of face abilities. I ran SK/SHM combo for a while and some of our fights were epics because of the lack of general face-melting. We were never in any danger. Neither were the mobs.
Druids can do some pretty decent DPS, but it's situational. The best DPS comes from DoTs, so if you're fighting mobs which die fairly quickly, then you're wasting much of the potential DoT damage. Also, Druid DoTs tend to melt their mana bars about as quickly as they melt mobs! Also throw in free damage from AAs like Wrath of the Wild and Storm Strike, and things start to add up.
I was gonna say druid or ranger for the tracking utility, if you go druid don't neglect your AA's like spell casting subtlety, which is not auto-granted. Over-dotting druids can draw aggro, and they go splat rather quickly.
Thanks for all the input. So I'm leaning towards WIZ at this point -- gnome + ports -- plus I get to overnuke and draw agro and screw up things. I am worried that I will become addicted to ports, because I've never had them. Even with GH and PoK I see the utility. I also remember when I started that it was months before someone ever ported me somewhere. There just weren't druids and wizards porting people, because they didn't yet exist. Now the dozens of free ports I have at my fingertips are not sufficient -- I want more. Once we get 15-20 levels or so, the group make-up changes. The Cleric is probably the only thing that stays and we end up with SK/Monk/Bard/Cleric. So losing tracking short term if I don't go druid but get it back with the bard. We also lose spot heals; we considered adding J5 healer, but will likely go J5 DPS mercs and blame our new-to-EQ-but-not-to-healing-in-MMOs friend when we die. The important thing is that it is his fault when things go wrong. The good news is that I have convinced him that Gnome is the proper race for a cleric and the enchanter had already gone Gnome. Unfortunately the warrior is an Ogre.
