p1999 green endgame for casuals
 

So I recently started a wiz character on green having played a number of years ago on red (57 Monk up until right before Velious), knowing it's a gimped class but wanting to try it anyway. I am having fun but since I haven't played on a purely PvE server I'm wondering what kind of endgame I can look forward to. I had a blast raiding on red, getting raided by another guild mid-way and if I'm honest I don't have the time to commit to 4-5 hour raids at odd hours of the day/night. I'd love to get JBoots for my wiz when I hit 25 but I don't think I have a chance which means I'll need to wait for AC ring quest to be implemented and try my luck there (not sure how much that will be camped, but I imagine like everything else will be locked down by people playing 8+ hours a day).

I am enjoying the leveling experience, but I'm wondering if I'll ever get to achieve the really fun content that I remember way back from live with my limitations. As a wiz I feel likel I'll never be able to hold down camps for gear to sell for good pp or earn enough from port to afford the obscene prices I'm seeing for some items. Maybe I was spoiled by red being less heavily camped or at least having camps be contestable by PvP that a PvE server isn't for me. I guess what I'm asking for, realistically speaking will I be able to participate in raids on a server like this at the endgame, or will things be locked down by top tier guilds that claim/flag things literally minutes after they pop?

Wow, lots to unpack there. But in short:

1) Wizards do have it rough ... but even so they can earn plat just as any class can

2) with enough plat, all non-/list items are solvable

3) none of that has anything to do with raiding (well, except that high-end raiding can help you make that plat), but really if Wizards have anything going for them it's raiding: their DPS is at its best for raid mobs, and you can't even get to certain raid zones without them.

My advice: have fun and stop worrying. Go try doing the JBoots camp: I got mine in like 4 hours on New Year's Day. Sure it all depends on the whims of RNG Jesus, but if you can play for at least that long at a time, give the camp a shot. Even if you sit for a few hours and have to quit, you'll get a sense of how doable it is or isn't.

Plus, while most people just sit in the Drelzna room, you can totally do the jail or the crystal room while you wait on the list. Both should give XP at your level and are within /list range, so even if you don't get the boots, your time won't be a waste. Also, those mages in the crystal room can give you a full suit of Damask Armor, which isn't terrible for Int casters.

And if you really can only play for a max of 2 hours, you're still not screwed. Start farming plat now, and someday you'll buy your AC ring MQ ... or whatever else you want. Just view everything as a marathon to someday get what you want, and not a mad sprint you have to make: that's only for the Guise and Manastone people.

green has many adventures to offer but vanilla has no endgame to speak of, let alone as a wizard. play blue if you want to endgame.

I don't see why a casual wizard can't do just about anything and everything on p99. Solo easier items for self or cash (think stuff like hadden, mortificator sythrak, hill giants, etc for solo cash), group anything with good friends/guildies, planar clears and stuff like fire giants with guildies, killing gods and dragons if you join a "competitive" guild, in classic and kunark and velious.

It's rare that a guild requires you to be around for ANY period of time, let alone 4-5 hours. You may not have great chances at any given piece of loot if you don't play as often as everyone else, but the warmbody zerg style guilds aren't going to turn away a wizard whose mana turns into damage just as well as any other wizard's does just because you don't play 8 hours straight every time you log on.


It's pretty safe to ignore the people who say "there's no endgame in [whatever]." Of course there's no steady diet of instanced raid content to clear at scheduled times on the same 3 nights every week so you can have all the same gear as every other member of your class on the whole server within 6-8 weeks of play. But that's not why we're playing EQ. It's not that there's no endgame... it's just different. "Endgame" in EQ is more about friends and guildies and alts and farming and exploring than pounding through a mudflation gear treadmill cycle every few months. Wizards can do EQ "endgame" stuff, especially with a supportive /friend list or guild.

There's a running debate between which is the worst class in this era of EQ: Ranger or Wizard. Without entering into that debate, suffice it to say that in this era those two are the very worst classes overall.

I'll let others explain the fine details, but the point is, OP has a legitimate basis for feeling his class is weaker than others: it objectively is. But at the same time, even the "weakest" class can absolutely be a valued and contributing member of a group or raid, and again with Wizards most of their weakness is in groups and other non-raid settings: raiding is more their strength.

P.S. I think that, because of resist issues, Wizards have some raiding problems in Velious? I'm not a Wizard player so I don't know the details: I just know that the community consensus, backed up with some very long "point by point" posts, shows that Rangers/Wizards are weak. Ultimately some classes are always weak in every era of EQ (balancing all those classes is really hard), and if we ever made it to Luclin Wizards would be on fire ... but we'll never make it that far, which just happens to be unfortunate for them.

Raiding does not equal endgame in my opinion. Endgame to me is getting to or near max level, getting the best available equipment, maxing out all skills, camping items for your alt, helping your guild and newbies out.

Wizards are good for raids, not for groups. Rangers are good for taking death touches in raids.

People who think wizards are gimped or the worst class have a very narrow view of what it means to play the game. OP: wizards can camp plenty and are one of the best raid classes in each era, there's no shortage of endgame experience as a wizard.

Apologies: I really didn't mean to join in on class-hating. There's a million details to making a class "good", and then a million contexts in which "good" can mean different things.

My point was just that in our era certain objective and measurable things, like say sustained DPS output in a group, are worse for Rangers/Wizards than other DPS classes. But someone is an idiot if they hate on Wizards as raiders ... because they jumped on a bandwagon of hate that was based on their grouping capabilities :)

And really even when it comes to (say) grouping, a lot of numbers-only comparisons miss out on other important details. It's hard to gauge, for instance, the value a Ranger provides as a backup tank, even though it's easy to measure their lack of DPS. So I was just trying to say that OP had a legitimate gripe if he felt that (again, in this era) other classes were being more useful in groups ... but I was not trying to say that Wizards suck!

Mmm, on live EQ during POP, GOD, OOW, DON, Demiplane and the few expansions afterwards, there was a massive difference in gearing levels between members of the same class on the same servers, perpetually. Often most players on a server could not even get close to entering higher tier raid zones while the expansion was current or even for a few expansions beyond. Scheduled raids and instancing didn't make it easier to see progression content while it was current. It just changed the primary nature of the challenge.