I'll try it! Going druid :)

Disclaimer: I know hardly anything about this game so you will have to deal with all my noobish antics.

We all been in thoes shoes once. Lucky you that you dont know much. Sadly i know to much so its not as interesting as it was once. But still love this game. We will guide people who need advice.

Heh atleast now we have a exact date from uthgard that when we can get in the server :D

I don't think it will take up to a year.. we are closer than you think. Most of the stuff is done, and there's already been closed beta testing, so the bigger bugs have been smashed already. Now we just have to go find some annoying ants and mosquitoes to squash out real fast, so the server can launch. I'm predicting 2-6 months of beta. Everyone is so excited about it, even the Devs have been MUCH more active lately, showing their determination on getting this opened up.

Man, I never even played live DAoC. My first experience was when Scrooge introduced me to Uthgard, several years ago. I absolutely loved it. I think it's a nice blend of PvE and PvP, and I'm really not into PvP games that much because I don't like competition. But the PvP in DAoC is just so legit.. and the points you get from doing it to spend on upgrading your character, which also helps in PvE.

Glad to hear it! Don't worry about the learning curve, it's safe to say that players coming from EQ to DAoC get adjusted to PvE alot easier, than players coming from DAoC to EQ.

Druids in this game aren't just about being a healer/support class, they have some very good offense too, like being able to dispel the enemy's buffs. Stat Buffs make a much bigger effect on player/group performance in this game than people realize. The 'Nurture' spec-line has both; check out the Uthgard Char Builder sometime.

Feel free to drop by our IRC chat channel, everyone should imo! Don't leave if no one replies right away, sometimes ppl are just semi-afk, and more of us will be present as we get closer to launch day.

I'll be playing, albeit not full time. I'll be rolling with Scrooge, whichever team he chooses.

I think that if we could create a guild from P99 forumgoers, etc, we could be pretty successful. Grouping would be easy, we could get a core class makeup for the guild, and we could recruit what we need for whatever else we need.

The PvE is pretty straightforward, right? The emphasis seems to be on RvR.

I played with the char builder but without playing the game, it's just a table full of numbers and stats and words to me. Druids don't get nukes or anything, right?

druids are the primary healer in hibernia. groups/spread and direct heals. Most builds are 42/30. 30 is the magic number in the healing line for the spread heal (grp heal that heals those that need the most healing). Near impossible to solo XP as a druid, but will always get a group for leveling.

Just saw this thread. I'm giving this a go, I loved the shit out of DaoC from retail. The big question will be how it performs on a quad processor Win 7 machine. Nothing special but EQ had issues with it.

To reply involving druids, you could use a sword and board, scale armor (upper levels), and spec Nature (I think? going from memory) for a better weapon buff, better DoT damage, and a bigger pet. A druid spec'd for damage could solo pretty well, with limited Root crowd control to deal with a double pull. They were also absolute nightmares for stealthing classes in the mid level battlegrounds.

Someone remind me - you could respec your characer build points in the game up to... twice I think?

Edit - holy crap, I forgot how jam packed the Norse casters were. From what I recall, each realm HAD to have access to the same basic wide range of heals, buffs, debuffs, and CC so that there wasn't anything missing from any of the 3 realm choices. In order to accomplish that for the Norse faction, the healer / shaman and runemaster / spiritmaster were godly with their baseline / spec packages. I... I'm having a hard time forming a compelling argument to not ether roll a frostalf Cave shaman (to level / BG) or a Runemaster for bolts, nearsight, and basic bubble. Argh.