Wisdom/Int/+Mana gear isn't super useful if you aren't full mana.

[WokeCat]

One of my friends just started playing P99 again after being away for over 20 years and he keeps telling me that the game is too hard because he has to meditate after every pull due to low wisdom.

In my experience, even with high wisdom, I have to meditate after every pull and I recover mana at the same rate as someone with low wisdom. Since most people don't regularly meditate to full mana, I don't think that the person with lower wisdom is going to be dramatically less efficient at killing mobs than the person with higher wisdom.

I've also played a Gnome Cleric alongside a High Elf Cleric who had dramatically more mana than me, and we were both constantly OOM and recovering mana at the same rate, and it quickly became apparent that we had roughly the same casting/healing prowess in a grouping situation where neither of us would ever be afforded the opportunity to meditate for longer than 5 minutes.

I also stole my Iksar Necromancer's gear to give to another character I play and then proceeded to log back onto the Iksar Necromancer and farm the same camp I've always farmed while completely naked and I really couldn't tell much of a difference at all.

Additionally, in some situations where I'm solo'ing and I'm never going to be able to meditate passed 50% mana, I've found that having higher armor gear is more useful than having wisdom gear that doesn't really do anything outside of situations where you are full mana.

Not attacking anyone, nor am I saying wisdom gear is useless. There are plenty of situations where having more mana would have made solo'ing easier (going OOM killing 2 treants and not being able to recover enough mana to keep up with respawns was frustrating since I saw better geared Shamans be able to kill them 2-3 times before going OOM).

But I don't think having high wisdom is super critical to leveling a new character. Especially since most Wisdom characters can heal, and the majority of the melees on P99 are super geared, so they generally require very little healing and it feels like they just invite most healers as a safety precaution rather than an actual requirement.

Again, I'm not attacking anyone, and I'm sure a lot of people do disagree with me, but it's frustrating how many people don't seem to realize that having a lot of Wisdom, Intelligence, or +Mana gear isn't going to dramatically impact their ability to play this game. I feel like melees could make a much stronger argument for why being under-geared is negatively impacting their ability to the play the game.

In closing, I want to state that Gnome is still the best race for Cleric despite having less Wisdom than Trolls.