If you can box them effectively (say for example IS Boxer), you will have plenty of dps, and the drop in dps you get will hardly be noticeable. You can run into aggro and mana barriers for faster killing. Given your parameters, I would suggest wiz wiz mage, I would personally take wiz, mage, bard, and enjoy the fountain of mana, as well as a very easy box character, with good adps and no fuzz utility. The bard will make it easier for the tanks to hold aggro. The main reason to take a mage is group coth. I use it even to move short distances into a dungeon. When you break an average of 250k dps, a 5 million hp mob takes 20 sec. In that case, 50k more dps does not matter much, instead you will want faster pulling, faster setup, etc.
Nice necro! Answering this question two and a half years later, tanks are so OP that any group with them is focused on them and everyone else is there to support the tank or try to out dps the tank ( and half the dps classes right now including mages and necros should fail at this!) Itd be fun to be the bard in a healer/bard + 4 wizard group that focused on outdoor fighting, and then youd have a viable caster focused group. But you could swap out one caster for a tank and kill 2x faster, cleaner and be able to fight in dungeon or do an AE group or something.
3 Wizards allows you to fulminate Frostbound Alliance pretty easily. It can be done with just 2 wizards, but i think you'd regret not making a 3rd
Pali, druid, chanter, mage, wiz, wiz is an awesome group, well, until you fight stuff that is magic resistant Nothing in the group game will give you much trouble though. One mage in the group is much better than just another wiz. The raw damage output difference, when you add in the pet, is actually negligible, and you gain a ton of utility. Having both a druid and mage in group is also really great synergy, as the druid fire based dots and fire debuffs, really go well with a mages toolset. Theory crafting for min/max DPS, and ignoring real world benefits of certain classes, is a bad idea. Not sure why you don't care about CoH, but you should lol, it's awesome. Is this a box, or are these actual people? Either way, CoH is really valuable. If one of your team shows up late, there are many places in the game where not having CoH will make your life a pain in the rear, and for what? The other question is, how much DPS do you actually need? 2 wizzes , a druid, a chanter, and a mage all trying to kill something is already overkill. Chanter, druid, mage, wiz has amazing synergy, and they are all valuable. Pets are also incredibly useful, not only for an offtank, but just sustained damage, especially on long fights. All that being said, you could just do palie, druid, chanter, and 3 wiz mercs and achieve 98% the same result, if you're boxing that is.
