[Cogwell]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well, certainly, druids are on par with mages if mages don't use pets. Warriors are also on par with rogues if they don't backstab.

Back in the day, people tended to not let magicians and necromancers use pets in raids. That's because we were stupid. There's really very, very few raids where pets are a liability, and any trouble almost always boils down to the owner being a moron. One can assume that a magician will almost always have a pet up, and that makes up a significant portion of their damage. That's why their nukes are similar to druids'.

The difference is that magicians have some utility that's actually valuable. Look at druids: they can do so many things, but virtually none of it is needed in a raid. It's fine for 5-mans where there's barely any overlap, but when your utility consists of things that are mostly designed to complement soloing, it falls short in a raid environment. What are you gonna do, SoW people and buff their agility? Cast a damage shield on the tank? Track for mobs? Not only are these things far less valuable than real utility but there's almost always a handful of classes that can do it. The individual druid in a raid is probably the least valuable role in the game. The one and only thing that druids can actually provide over others is their Circle of Summer/Winter stuff, and that's not exactly a strict necessity. Magicians, on the other hand, have mod rods, an underrated but extremely useful thing to have around. They can also help apply malowhatever to mobs, something that usually has to be done in a hell of a hurry, so having an extra guy trying is great. Then you have Call of the Hero, a spell that you can build entire raid strategies around. And really, there is no sense in trying to argue that druids are better at dealing damage than magicians.

PoTG was a significant source of mana regen, Druid FR and CR buffs were somewhere between 5-10 points better than normal "Resist X" spells, and the level of healing needed during your average boss fight is conservatively 10x more than Kunark. That means that druids aren't going to be DPSing unless you have a total glut of Clerics, not to mention of significant amount of poison and disease AEs that will need curing during the event.