A Couple Quick QuestionsFollow

1. Yes, you will find player-sold items at a Broker. Nearly every city zone has one, most are within the Wholesale Tradeskill zone in the towns. You double-click the broker and a familiar search window pops up allowing you to sort and refine your search.

2. You can cast spells on yourself, just target yourself by clicking yourself or pressing F1. You can also cast spells on others, although some of your spells will be "group friend" only. True, once you are dead, you can do nothing but rez back at a designated spot in the zone. No corpse run, though - you'll be fully equipped.

3. Druids are not like EQ1 Druids - root/snare, DoT, kite, repeat, win. Now you will be a healer with HoT's, DoT's, and some buffs. All Priests are healers, they just do it differently and have different abilities.
Cleric's have large single target heals and can wear plate armor.
Shaman's have heals and Wards (prevent damage), debuffs/slow, and wear medium armor.
Druids have HoT's, buffs, and wear medium armor.

As an EQ2 Druid (I also played EQ1 Druid) that continued into the path of Warden, I have very good HoT's for a party fighting many tough mobs. I can also cast and stack several group AE HoT's, plus a few HoT's on the tank to ensure everyone is healthy and happy.

When I solo, my usual tactic is to root and DoT, nuke, then melee using Heroic Opportunities for added damage. Smite will eventually get replaced with more powerful spells, but it will be your standard solo tactic.

My guild has a 60 Warden that has upgraded his main nuke spell. He does considerable damage with that. :)

I thought I might add a little from a Cleric's (Templar) point of view. We can indeed solo in EQ2, which is great and one of the main reasons I switched to this game over EQ1. That said, we solo VERY slowly, and you have to have good gear to attempt anything other than easy stuff because we have to stand toe to toe with the bad guys and slug it out slowly. Our smite gets upgraded but not by much. It's gets weaker bit by bit compared to the MoB's hit points as you go up in tiers. We do get another low damage spell line that does double against undead, but even that's not much. Furies do 2 to 3 times the damage per second of a Templar and their fights take half the time, even though we're supposed to be in the same damage tier. Hopefully that's something SOE will tweak sometime soon, but for now be aware of the state of things if you plan to solo much.

As for healing, I think we're the best by a small margin, in most situations. We have the greatest number of tools to heal and prevent damage. Any healer class can handle even level grouping content. Those fights often go by so fast that healing isn't really a consideration. (Some people say other healers are better choices for grouping in those places because they have equal healing but more utility or DPS to contribute. I'm ambivalent.) When fights get long and hard is when we shine. The situation where clerics are at a disadvantage is when the MoB's hit hard and slow (casters...). Our direct heals have long recast timers and reactives don't cut it when your tank isn't getting hit that often, and the reactive only replaces a small percentage of the damage being dealt per hit.

Hopefully I don't sound too negative here, I do love the game and my Templar. I just want to let you know about the soloing thing before you get deep into leveling your cleric, since it was mentioned as an important consideration. Look me up if you're on Nektulos and you need a weapon or a guild.

Also hint for those of you grouping with Templars. Alot of tanks dont seem to understand how our heals work so they tend to stray from large groups of heroics. I would rather have 5 lvl 42 mobs beating on my tank then 1 of them. This is for the simple fact that if they are both heroic the 5 of them hit for less per hit normally and allow the tank gain a larger percentage of health each time they are hit rather then slowly going down cuz of the large single hits that are doing more damage per hit then the heals as explained by Lydiaele. Granted the other healer classes dont have this problem because there heals either ward X amount or heal X amount. Ours heal X amount each time you are hit.

Also unless they fixed it. Templars do not mix that well with healers that ward because our heals dont proc unless you take damage. If you get low on health and get a ward thrown on you. You most likely have a heal on you too but it is not going off cuz you are not taking damage and it weres off before the ward is gone.

Guards need to just hit you once to force you out of the city, but it makes for some exciting adventuring.

I needed to get a quest from an NPC in Freeport, and me and my other high-level friend had to sneak like alley cats into Freeport. We were used to blasting opponents into dust, but the one-hit issue presented a challenging problem.

Eventually, I enlisted the help of a local Dark Elf to keep the roaming guard busy while we quickly talked to the NPC.