at the end of the day i think the previously quoted city based system is better

I agree with the OP. They illustrate the many points I favor regarding somewhat trivial/silly changes that lead to deeper game play.

Here's the thing about trying to create a mix of custom teams: you probably can't come up with something better than what SZ had. When you start tinkering around making seemingly minor changes, you end up with much bigger impacts than you might initially realize. The SZ teams were not just pulled out of the developers' asses back in the day. They were based upon the experience of both RZ and VZ/TZ, and the expert understanding of the devs regarding class balance and raiding needs.

This is why you can't do something silly and deny an entire team access to Bards, or Shamans, or Monks and expect team balance, but you can get away with limiting SKs, Rangers, Necros, Paladins and Druids. When you factor in the necessity of certain classes for raiding and EQ's existing lore, it is simply very difficult to split up the races/classes into three teams better than SZ did.

Further, one of the best reasons to use classic SZ teams on the new Teams server is not just that we know their strengths, but their weaknesses as well. We have direct experience on the shortcomings of the SZ teams (Evil being OP, Good being weak) and can use that knowledge to correct the imbalance on Teams '99. Any sort of custom Teams ruleset would have unknown strengths and weaknesses since they would never have been put in practice before. Since it's impossible to design a perfect ruleset within the confines of classic EQ, all we can do is try to design the best ruleset.

This is why I think going with SZ teams is the best bet. They are proven and they are tested, both their pros and cons. And we can address the cons with some minor, elegant fixes like Evil team FFA PvP, stat bonuses to Good and Neut, and FV hammers.

And really, the fact that so many people are so vocal about clamoring for SZ rules should not go unnoticed. There's a reason you don't see nearly as many people championing RZ or TZ/VZ rules: because they simply weren't as good in comparison.

So there really is no need to try to reinvent the wheel with a custom teams ruleset. The Devs did the heavy lifting for us back in the day. The teams breakdown they came up with was SZ, and it's a very good one that can work well on Teams '99 with a few tweaks.

Did Neutral actually have Monks, or any FD class on SZ? Were the religions capable of Monk changed or something?

Yes, Human Monks could worship Veeshan on SZ, which gave the Neutral team access to them.

This was done specifically for balance reasons, since by default classic lore Human Monks are Agnostic/Quellious only.

monks could be veeshan

meh vex u good man, a little too good.

Oh and now I find it, and it seems there were Mith Marr Shaman as well. Well now the whole thing just seems a lot better.