[Benanov]

You could think about it from a utility perspective. How well can you travel? How useful are you to other players?

Shamen are high-utility. They can buff pretty much every stat you have (minus INT/WIS iirc) and they have the most requested travel spell in the game - spirit of wolf. Vision buffs? Yep. Enduring breath? Yep. Regen? Yep. People are going to interact with you a lot, and you'll get invited to a lot of groups - shaman slows are very good and you can even tank at lower levels (or, with Torpor, at high levels). You can invis, but no invis vs undead. You get a pet, which is basically a cute weak DoT. You're a decent main healer, one of only three slowers (I'm counting Bard), and a decent source of DoT damage. I played one to 14 and was bored, though. They apparently open up in the 30's. Aside: Ultravision is beautiful on Green/Teal if you're playing a nightblind race.

Wizards are more medium utility. Druids are the better taxi class, but Wizards get a lot of travel options and their usefulness in a group is inverse of how well the group is doing at the steady stream of single pulls game (get a few clickies to help with that). When things go pear-shaped and that healer mob needs to die NOW, yeah that's when you want a wizard. You wanna faction up fast on green cons? Wizard. Wizards also are immune to puny things like "damage shields" that rip melees to shreds. Wizards are the only class getting you to Hate and Sky. You'll solo easily (especially post-29) but you'll struggle for groups here and there. Join a good guild. (Aside: If you ever manage to group with 2 wizards and a mage...holy crap, things just don't live long.) Wizards get a stun or two, which is handy. Stuns are crazy aggro, but when you need to interrupt a caster NOW, it's nice.

Clerics are fairly high utility. You're amazing vs. undead and cleric undead nukes rival wizards for mana efficiency and damage ratios. You get invis vs undead pretty early. Get yourself a Bonethunder Staff, and you're the quintessential Battle Priest in Unrest. The anti-summoned line isn't as good as mages or druids, but I'll mention it because it does have its place, if you can ever find space on your spell bar for it. Root is passable CC, if no enchanter. Your buffs are always welcomed. Stuns are a lot more useful than anyone thinks they are (charmed mob breaks? Stun it; the charmer will thank you). A valid strategy for a very bored cleric is to stun-lock a mob. Depending on the length of the fight, you can spend less mana stunning than you do healing. (Plus it's fun as hell watching the tanks desperately try to taunt off of stun aggro, when the thing just isn't hitting you because it's stunned all the time.) You have 36 seconds of blissful invincibility, if you can ever get the blasted spell to channel. Lull/Root/Atone allows for some interesting dungoneering tricks.

However, you have very few options for traveling. You've got gate/bind but that kind of fades by 29, as you'll be the one expected to bind close to rez everyone else on a TPW. Oh yes - that. Except for Paladins, you're doing all the rezzing. I haven't gotten a lot of begging for rezzes at 29 (the 0% is for 'oops I am bound on the other side of OOT'), but I suspect at 39 it's a steady stream of begging, and at 49 it'll be pretty bad.

However, you do have the fact that everyone bends over backwards to escort you where you need to go. Tanks will fall all over themselves to taunt off of you, DPS classes will even try to taunt off of you, and casters will melt a mob if it looks your way. It's pretty easy to get an invisibility or a wolf spirit. No one wants to piss off a cleric.

Just...don't expect to solo well. I'm soloing skeletons in Rathe Mountains in between groups and it's ~55% mana per one skel at 29. (That's down from 95% at 24.) It's very, very slow.