Beastlords, raids, and guilds

[lelandfallon]

Hello everyone.. Me again.. I was talking to some experiance players of eq, and was wondering about the beastlord class, because i notice on the recruiting page, theres not a whole lot of guilds asking for us.. So, anyways i asked this player whats the difference between the bst and the shaman, i mean besides the biger slow, and more buffs.. He said that the beastlord is great in groups, ( which i mainly do honestly ) but on a raid, there mostly just some dps.. Where a shaman, is cures,heals,buffs,slows,etc.. He said if i want to get to 75 the fastest, bstlord is the way to, but if i want to raid in the future, and be able to do pickup groups and gain faster aas with grouping, a shaman is the way to go.. I have read some posts here that we as beastlords, dont really have a rolse in raids besides some dps.. I looked on the shaman site, and there are posts after post of recruitment for the class.. Anyways, i was wondering what do you guys think about it??.. And does anyone know of where we are heading in what direction in the near future?.

Pudan Of Zek

[Inphared]

Currently we provide middle-class DPS with some slight utility. Depending on how many beastlords a guild has they can put out three or four paragons on a raid which gives your raid a substantial amount of mana to use. Much more than that and you start eating into raid spots usable by other classes. As for what direction we're going in the future, no one can really answer that without breaking a few rules.  :-P

[Maylian]

Like Imphared says in raids we're so so, we can put out some solid DPS but nothing a monk, rogue, berserker or wizard can't beat without the utility to make us that little bit more desirable. In my guild we have two beastlords with recruitment closed for the class, and it's my belief we only have two because one is the guild leader.

Group wise I would say we've always had a very good niche that we fill. We are very capable at slowing, reasonable buffs, good group dps, some spare healing if needed and some in a pinch tanking. If we get a group haste next expansion I think we'll have a better time in groups and possibly as desirable as shamans.

To sum I think beast's are in a fairly good position a few tweaks could make this better for us in raids. Plus we are a very fun class to learn and play whilst levelling up, just be aware that to operate well we probably need more AA's than most other classes.

[Tigrah]

it's too bad that our guild rarely fields more than 2-3 bsts at a time lol we have more than our fair share of bsts though, and we provide a decent service to the guild community with SE, and when palies aren't around (yeah we actually hit anguish with 0 palies) our SV is in high demand.

[Khauruk]

Our dps is improving greatly over the last few expansions...we'll see what SoF holds for us soon.  Our group utility is high, but I rarely get invites by anybody I don't know, because we're considered 3rd rate slowers/dps.  We can do fine in either role (and often tanking, if you set your toon up right), but we don't have the 'image' of being great at these things.

As a shaman, life will be "easier," for sure.  If you want to raid, you're highly desired.  It's easier to gear up, it's easier to get groups, it's easier to get guilded.  BST may get to 65 faster solo, but post 65, I think shammies own us - root/rotting red mobs is crazy good xp.  Shammies are a cool class, but imo, not as much fun to play.

[Denti]

Solid middle class dps, nothing spectacular though and very little real utility on raids. Sure, some casters still use SE and some raid leaders use paragon, however with four beastlords on the roster we see regularly 2 or 3 of them sitting out during raids to get more needed classes into the raid.

Nowadays if something really goes wrong a paragon just cant help it, encounter mechanics and mob hits are too difficult for an easy solution like that. Paragon is more use if you have new casters who dont know yet how to manage their mana.

Group-wise we're well off and actually more interesting to groups than many shamans, one reason might be that shamans are in much shorter supply of course. I tried some LFG and was surprised that i do get group invites pretty fast nowadays, however wearing the servers top guild tag helps there.