Thread: Rare classes or classes needed/wanted for grouping?

Are there any classes that are rare to find played or classes that are needed/wanted for grouping/raids that tend to be hard to find online or played as a main?

For 6 man content you find a bottle neck in dedicated healers and tanks. What is 'rare' depends on time of day, flavor of the month, server - etc. DPS is a role that can be filled by a great many classes, and a specific DD isn't needed for many instances(some are easier using a champ, some easier with a burg, some easier with hunters. When it comes down to it though; you /usually/ want a dedicated healer and a dedicated tank(IE: rk/minnie guard/warden). While these aren't mandatory in a lot of cases, and which is 'better' in x situation is debateable they are /usually/ the bottleneck.

Distribution is fairly even, but not entirely even. You can break classes up into their function and think about it that way:

Tanks: Guard & Warden
Healers: Minstrel & RK
Single-target DPS classes: Hunter, RK, Burg, Champ
Multi-target DPS classes: Champ, LM (Hunter and RK to a lesser degree)
CC classes: LM (Burg & Hunter to a lesser degree)
Buffing: Captain (Minstrel to a lesser degree)
Debuffing: LMs and Burgs.

In a typical group, you'll always have a tank and a healer, which means those 4 classes have a constant demand. Guard is slightly more preferable to Warden because of damage mitigation, which matters against huge mobs. Minstrel is slightly more preferable to RK because of how healing is handled between them - reactive heals (Minnie) are more useful than proactive heals (RK) in most situations.

Raids always want at least one captain (usually 2). The rest of the class makeup desire is going to depend largely on the raid - some raids are set up preferencing ranged damage, while others make better use of melee. Some need lots and lots of CC, while others need none at all. Some bosses hit too hard for even good healers & tanks to handle, and debuffs are needed to keep the boss from hitting too hard. Etc. So what is specifically desired at any moment will change...

all of that said...

Groups tend to break down as follows:
1 tank
1 healer
at least 1 utility (captain/burg/LM)
remaining DPS (champ/hunter/RK preferenced, can fill dps with LM/burg also)

As a result, the demand for specific classes (tanks & healers) is actually a bit higher than their population.

Population breaks down roughly as follows:
1. Hunters
2. Champs
3. Guards
4. Minstrels
5. LM (near-4-way-tie)
5. Captain
5. Burg
5. RK
9. Warden

If you're hope is to roll a character that will fill the "missing" role in groups or raids, check with your kinship and with people on your server at times when you like to play.

There's usually not a missing class for 6-man content because most group make ups will work for 6-mans.

For raids (12 or 24 man content) the classes that most raids have trouble filling are captains (since most raids want 2, especially now that their uber buff In Defense of Middle Earth is an aoe toggle vs a buff) and lore masters. Burgs are also valuable for raids, but I rarely see a raid held up for lack of a burg. I have seen them held up for lack of an LM.

This info, however, will change by server, time of day and kinship. At one point my kin alone had 3 or more lvl cap LMs that were on all the time, but over the last year all 3 stopped playing or at least stopped playing their LMs. Answering this post 6 months ago would have been different for my kinship. So ask around with people you play with regularly.

I think what is hard to find depends quite a lot on the particular raid that is popular and often temporary changes within kins/servers. When OD was the main end-game raid, LMs tended to be in short supply. They hadn't been essential in previous raids and were very useful in several of the OD fights, so suddenly they were in high demand. Since the RoI update, in our kin we have enough LMs (which aren't essential in the Draigoch raid) and are swimming in Burgs but are missing guards...though we have 3-4 wardens.

Every time I have made a toon thinking that my kin was short that class and I could help out, by the time I had it ready to raid, 2-3 other people had done the same or we had found some new players with that class as their main, so my newbie toon was not needed and I was back to my RK.

I do agree with BlancFallowhide, though, that overall, probably the most consistently needed class is a captain. A well-played captain can main-tank or main-heal most if not all of the 3 or 6 man instances in the game, and for raids, most groups prefer to have 2.

Captain...captain...captain.

If you think that grouping is mostly what you want to do in this game. Captain. They do it all, and they make everyone else's job easier. Sometimes they stop a party wipe from happening and the rest of the group doesn't even know it.

Yeah make a captain.