[loramin]

Originally Posted by E-Queue [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Everyone agrees Barbarians are the worst shaman race

No, everyone does not agree with that (sorry, my Barbarian Shaman main takes offense at that). What everyone agrees is that Barbarians are the worst Shaman race, by a small margin, IF you put in enough time. That's a huge difference. Many (most?) players will never even make it 60 with their Shaman before they quit the server, quit EQ, or switch to an alt, and for all of them the established advice that Barbarians are the worst is 100% wrong.

Barbarians get two advantages that are HUGE, and make them the best Shaman race < 60: good faction and the lowest XP penalty. Both of those let them level faster: the low XP penalty is obvious, but the good faction means you can run to a friendly city, run back to an XPing spot, and get back to earning XP much faster than the Shaman who has to run much farther (or else that Shaman will be much broker than you; either way you have a clear advantage).

Having more levels makes you significantly more powerful than a lower-level Shaman, no matter what your respective races are, and up until they hit 60 a Barbarian Shaman (all else being equal) will be levels ahead of all other Shaman races. Again, that's huge.

Now, Iksar/Trolls get regen, and that's pretty cool for leveling too. It does not make you level fast enough to make up for the higher XP penalty, but it comes close, and it means less downtime. In other words, you might take a little longer than the Barbarian to get to 60, but you get to spend more time playing and less time sitting on your ass. Meanwhile Ogres pretty much just suck (by comparison; they don't really suck) until 60, because while their frontal stun immunity isn't useless when leveling, it almost is compared to regen or a lower XP penalty (although to be fair their XP penalty of 15% isn't quite as bad as the Iksar/Troll 20%).

It's only once you get to 60 (and fix all the factions you care about) that Barbarians become the worst race and Ogres become the best. But at that point the differences between races are much smaller. Yes a level 60 Iksar/Troll Shaman will always regenerate faster than a Barbarian ... but once you get Torpor I can guarantee you won't ever notice the difference. Similarly FSI is cool, but only really for soloing especially hard mobs, and even then it's far from a game-changer: there is not a single mob in the game that an Ogre Shaman can take that a Shaman of another race can't. There's not even a mob that Ogre's have a 4x, 3x, or even 2x better chance of defeating: FSI only gives like a 10% increase in success rate (I made that number up, but I'm sure the actual number is somewhere in that neighborhood).

/rant off

Originally Posted by E-Queue [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So... my question to any shaman vets out there is if I am able to twink the toon with a fungi, does that pretty much completely negate the Barbarian gimpy-ness?

No, it does not, because Barbarians are not gimpy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] More importantly, Iksar/Troll regen is never a Fungi's worth of regen more than Barbarians/Ogres. As the charts on the wiki show, for the bulk of your leveling (20-49) a Barbarian/Ogre regens 2 HP/tick while sitting, while an Iksar/Troll regenerates 6 HP, a difference of 4 HP/tick. Things get better at the high levels, but the difference never reaches Fungi (15 HP/tick) levels.

Again, when leveling what's more important is the Iksar/Troll 20% XP penalty, vs. the Barbarian 5%. If a Barb plays for 105 hours, a Troll has to play for 15 more to catch up. As great as their regen is, and as much time as it will save, those 4 extra HP a tick (40 a minute, 240 an hour, 2,400 HP over 100 hours) are probably not going to save them 15 hours of playtime. Oh, and all that assumes no death: the more times you die the bigger of a deal the lower Barbarian penalty becomes.

Quite honestly in my opinion before 60 Barbarian is the best race. But it's hard to measure exactly how much time the regen saves, and even if it's less than the Barbarian lower penalty saves, there's still something to be said for having to sit on your ass less. Plus non-Barbarians can choose to never fix any factions, only camp places close to evil vendors, and not "lose to Barbarians" that way, so if you play them right an Iksar/Troll should get to 60 almost as fast as a Barbarian, and maybe even have more fun doing it.

But I think what you're really wondering about is the long fun, ie. level 60 ...

Originally Posted by E-Queue [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Or am I still going to regret not being able to stack fungi regen with racial regen?

Almost certainly not. See everything above for 1 to 59. Then at 60 you get this spell called Torpor, which is a heal over time. It only costs 200 mana to cast, and you can get that mana back with a couple casts of Cannibalize IV ... but Torpor heals way more HP than Cannibalize takes away, which means every Cannibalize IV you cast after the first two or three is "free mana". When you combine "free mana" with a spell that can heal you from 1 HP to max in only 1-2 casts (at only 200 mana per cast), suddenly the miniscule amount of HP that racial regen gives (or even the 15 HP/tick that the Fungi gives) really stops mattering.


TLDR; You're wrong about Barbarians: they're (arguably, because of the whole "more sitting on their ass vs. Iksar/Troll" thing) the best race until 60. At 60 Ogres are, but the difference between races from 1-59 is much bigger than the differences at 60. Thus, Barbarians don't need to feel "behind" any race until 60, and even then they should only feel slightly behind Ogres. They should never feel "behind" Iksar/Trolls, because their XP penalty > regen when it comes to saving time ... but there's a difference in playstyles between the two so it's not really that Barbs are better so much as all three races are good and the differences are very small.

Originally Posted by Tecmos Deception [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well, iksar/troll regen is an extra half fungi at 60.

Not quite, but you're close. Iksar/Troll regen at 60 = 18 (sitting) vs. Barb/Ogre regen at 60 = 6 (sitting), for a difference of 12 HP/tick. A whole fungi is a bit more (15 HP/tick), while half of one (7.5) is a fair bit less than the 12 HP/tick difference. But the real answer here is none of it matters once you get Torpor [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]