Taken I think had somewhere in the realm of 30-40 people at the end of the rotation keyed. Among them were two clerics. Wasn't really a VP force until a little into Kunark when dragons started to become feasible.
Now... if we had
classic resist checks on VP dragons then we've got an entirely different story. Since you could actually stack those resists and have some feasible change of resisting their AEs and not need 1 Cleric per group or lots of wort pots.