Quote:
Originally Posted by falkun
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Assuming leveling swiftly is his concern over digesting content, if he levels a shaman faster than a bard, he is playing his bard the wrong way. Bards are not gear dependent for anything, vendor instruments can carry you to 60 and you shouldn't be tanking so armor is secondary and no party is inviting you for your personal DPS, so weapons are also secondary. As Guineapig mentioned, everyone loves bards in raid groups, but they also love shaman.
Both will be busy during fights, shamans have slows to dish out to mobs and multitudes of buffs to hand out to the raid while bards can do just about anything, in 18sec bursts.
But paladins can be just as busy on raids and they are staple tanks for all group content. Groups will love your instant aggro (knights > warriors for groups imo), although the min-maxers will whine about the 40% exp penalty they have to share b/c you're in their group (I personally hate the min-max mentality being brought back to EQ). In raids, you can pick up adds easily with stuns (without breaking mezzes too!), they are the best healing hybrid, they are the only other class to receive 90% rez, and you can interrupt the casters before they get gates off.
As far as desirability, all the classes you are deciding between are welcome in groups.
You did mention that you wanted to try some solo dungeon crawling. I do not know how well shamans do in dungeons solo, but I will say that I enjoyed crawling into LGuk and soloing my Mask of Deception. I have also drunkenly logged out in Chardok, died trying to run out, CRing myself (no rez though), and then remembering to put my OT hammer to use all while solo at L50/51 (unding sucks). Bards are jacks of ALL trades, masters of very few, and the greats can pull off some remarkable stunts.
Whatever you decide, you cannot go wrong with any of these 3 classes. |
I'm not really concerned with leveling quickly, but I also don't want to take 4 1/2 hours of auto attacking blues just to get level 5 sort of slow that the EXP penalty on a Pally or SK seems to foster. I'm much more concerned with content digestion as you put it.
I've seen every nook and cranny of every outdoor zone in EQ, but sadly back in the day as a Wizard that had few friends, and no guild for a while (and leveled from 32-58 solely from quad kiting), I've hardly seen alot of the dungeons this game has to offer. Then PoP and LDON came out an no one even did most of the content anymore at all ever (even HHK basement was empty at all times on my server once LDON came out, which says alot because I was on Bristlebane).
I know that it can be a pain/impossible to get people to want to go to certain places just for the sake of going there (aka there isn't some specific loot they want, it's out of the way, the exp is bad etc) so that is why I have a concern with the ability to solo into an instance, so that I can see some of these places finally even if it is alone! I know the answer to that is roll Necro/Mage, but I'm not much for the pure dps type classes anymore and care more about utility to a group.