i find chanter extremely easy to box ( specially at higher level ).,i got audio trigger for when charm fade and i always keep both buff on chanter , so when the mob hit him they got stuned or mezed , so it let you have enough time to re-charm . ( i never forgot to reapply the buff if they fade tho ). i always try to keep a mob mezzed near camp as well to proc the twincast dd via that mez for extra damage casting chanter best 3 nukes. and with mage you got many ways to break mez, with servant pet or the instant cast summoned clickies. and if i am grouped with a " melee player " who got a serious beating , i am casting my " stun hot-key " to help him.
For sure mage/chanter could handle a wider variety of stuff, but I've enjoyed the killing speed and power of mage/necro a lot; they compliment each other really well. If you have good pet focus items and max pet offensive AA's (flurry and crit) their pets become an incredibly effective and easy fire-and-forget killing machines. With a healer and caster dps merc, I could pull 3 VoA dark blues at once, root one with the necro, and burn down all 3 in about 1 min, and from there I could keep pulling and killing blues 2-3 at a time at 20-30 seconds a kill. The only thing that would stop me from getting like 30+ AA's in a lesson was I'd run out of mobs and have to travel around. They could kill yellow cons in that short of time as well easily, it just got a little dangerous pulling those en 3's. I killed yellow con named with that combo no problem, the dps is so huge, just burst em down. But this was just at 96. If I could do any box over, I'd love to try a enc/druid. That seems like it'd be a lot of fun edit: forgot to mention they had some raid gear, but it was getting outdated at 95. Mage pet taunts really well, so basically I can send one garg, maybe 1-3 DoT's with necro and then turn on caster merc burn and tab the pet tank to the next mob to load up DoT's and swarm. By the time the first mob is at 50%, the second is at 75%, and they both are dead seconds later. Caster merc can stay on burn the whole time, as long as you tab the pet over to start taunting the second mob, he wont rip aggro The only downside is without great CC, I'd have to just punch through big pulls with all pet activated AA's running (and me praying), but if I learned to CotH or FD pull better I probably wouldnt have to worry about that hehe
Considering some odd combinations, I play mostly for fun but want to be able to accomplish things at the same time. I leveled a Shaman to 25 last night opposite my Mage, Now considering starting a character opposite my SK to box with started thinking of like I said 'odd' combinations. I never played a Pally/Druid/Cleric/Bard and very little with Enchanter, maybe 1 of these teamed with my Sk, decisions decisions....Maybe just level up some Characters then start experimenting with what I enjoy most(swapping them in and out) for now going to keep at a 2 box, for now ). Again thanks everyone for your input.
I'm a 2 box junkie, I have quite a few combos, but the ones I love the most are: 1. Mage + Chanter. So much fun, very powerful, and can be easy almost AFK team if content is easy and you need to farm. 2. Rogue + Shaman. Rogues....man, hard to play anything else once you play a rogue, those huge procs and crits just never get old. 3. Wiz + Chanter. Ports, snares, nukes. Wiz is one of the best "2nd" characters in the game due to them having almost no involvement in the beginnings of fights. 4. Druid + Monk. Druid is another awesome 2nd box, very low involvement in fights and easy to macro, ports and snares. In terms of raw power, Monk + shaman is better, but...ports and snares. In this day and age less important given all the travel options, but still can be handy. Both SK + shaman or Mage + sham are very solid combos. There are things you can do with a shaman that you just can't do with anything else, that slow becomes pretty huge later on.
Id take Sk/Mage over any of the other options. Because 1 merc healer is more then enough for most current content, and 2 Mage dps is miles better then Shaman, and at the end of the day you want to get things done in a timely fashion I personally played SK/Necro for the longest time and that was pretty elite.
I would recomend mag and shaman. Mag with healerMerc and sham with caster dps Merc. The synergy is amazing.
5. Druid can attack debuff to mitigate damage. Haven't seen any recent parse but at one point it was equivalent to slow (30%). Mechanically, druids mesh with SKs better than shammys. Unfortunately, shammys are much more powerful and that's why they trump druids. Druid skin and Mammoths strength are useful for mages but shammy buffs are, again, way more powerful. All that being said, I would go with shammy bot for buffs and enchanter to box.
