I think the Anon and uber guild cases are very different, but the point still remains.

To be clear, Anon (and I think most guilds of that level) never force anyone to play any character. It was never "play your damn cleric or you're out of the guild" or anything.

Instead, smaller guilds just have a limited force. If you only have one cleric and need two for whatever you're doing, Bob's choice of Cleric vs. Shadow Knight may mean the difference between the raid happening and the raid not happening.

Under such circumstances an individual may very much feel "forced to play a Cleric", but it's because they want their guild to be able to raid ... not because there's some asshole guild leader telling them what to do.

Well, if the situation is that serious, my cleric takes paypal.

I think the forums make p99 look a LOT worse than it actually is in-game. The vast majority of people are really chill.

I wouldn’t necessarily mind being forced to raid with one toon over another. EQ combat isn’t much more engaging when you’re spamming this hotkey over that hotkey. Am a bit surprised to see warriors suggested, though most of my raid experience is in luclin and PoP.

Will it not be true here that guilds mostly just need one MT, couple OT’s and I guess some backups? Curious really for the sake of it. I find warrior gameplay the most tedious.

My Velious main was a cleric. I always recommend someone play basically anything else. It is an indespensible class, sure, but in my opinion raiding in Velious as a cleric is simultaneously the most boring and most stressful thing you can do. One even minor fuck up can wipe the whole raid, and theres a lot of hurry up and wait. It gets mind numbing, and at least back in live the guilt trips to play the cleric were extremely real.

Most high end clerics I’ve interacted with were quite geared to the teeth atleast and easily able to hear out alts and convince others to PL them. That’s fair enough for me to suffer through the monotony, if it really works like that lol.

You can earn enough money to twink out an alt on any class. The thing with Cleric is that there is literally never enough clerics, so theres an expectation that you will bring them to the raid unless its trivial content.

And for me at least, the playstyle of the raid cleric is pretty miserable. Perhaps people do it better on p99 than we did it on live, I haven't played one here, but stuff like CH rotations aren't something I'd wish on anyone.

Warriors die, especially if a mob outlasts defensive disc. Errors can happen on tank switches (new tank takes aggro before cheal chain starts landing on it) so you want a few warriors on your tank line up. Likewise adds happen (off tanks) and some mobs rampage (need two tanks simultaneously for the same mob). Death touch can disappear tanks too.


As you can see lots of need for plenty of tanks. This is before we consider a single guild might park for several different targets at once, doubling the number of tanks needed.

Finally loot councils making executive decisions to autoaward items to specific players aren't popular on p1999. Most players/guilds seem to prefer to draw a dkp wage for the work they do and spend it on the items they feel best.

Ahh!! Thanks for the info. How are SK’s viewed in this regard? A little more fun gameplay wise

The hybrid tanks are fine if you intend to cap out at the lower-to-mid tier. The high-end culture on P99 regards hybrids as nigh-worthless and has for quite many years. Guilds won't necessarily turn hybrids down (see above comments about P99's guilds not generally being exclusive) but they'll be the first ones asked to play some other character if the raid composition isn't ideal. I have a Shadow Knight as my one and only max-level character, but I've no interest in high-end raiding. For what I do (lower-end content and non-raid stuff) it serves with full satisfaction.

Danth