I have been playing for a month or so on Luclin with some characters I started a year ago. I went and played on TLPs for a while while they were around level 70. With the anniversary shared task I was able to get them all to 75. From that point, I have really enjoyed leveling them. I've complete the OGH theme in SoD and I'm currently working the Daily Heroic Bonus Quests from PoK. I've done the Neriak line and I'm working on Bixie Hive now. I put all that in just to give you some idea what I know, and what I won't know. It looks like I have to do three quests to get to the bonus one assigned to me. I'm sure that is because most people have long since had them all unlocked. As my characters are all in Elegant defiant gear or lower, I'm not over powered for the content. It is my first time through, so I do have an occasional wipe and I search for stuff way too long. It takes me 90 minutes plus to figure out the CoF heroic adventures. My current box combo is 81/Pally (main), 81/Mage, 80/ENC. Once they get to 85, I'm going to use a Heroic upgrade to replace the ENC. I have 4 accounts. The only account without veteran awards is the one the ENC is on. I can get a Heroic character on my 4th account that will have veteran rewards (as you may guess, "lesson" is what I'm really after). My question is this. Should I stick with the ENC or is there another 3rd box that will work out better for me in the long run with the Pally/Mage duo locked in. I'm over 50 and a slow minded boxer. I have two big screens and I generally have the pally on one screen and the Mage/Enc on the other. I have been around off an on (mostly off) forever, so I'm up to speed on how to set up hot keys on the casters so that I can have them slow, debuff, and sic the pets on pulls. What I like about the ENC is that it gives me a pretty big eraser if I mess up. I can basically mesmerize everything and buy a little time to get my poor boxing stills back in sequence. That said, because the Pally is my main and fits my personality, I way under utilize the ENC. I debuff, lull, slow, pet attack, and mez adds. Other than that, it just sits there and casts haste every hour or so. I have though about another Mage or a Wizard. The Wizzy would add evac, which is a really nice skill for the instanced zones I'm predominately playing in atm. That would make up for the loss of pull/crowd control to some degree. However, my Pally is under equipped, which means partial slows are actually quite a bit of help. Slow, hmm, BST or Shaman. I think the BST would be good if I wanted to use it as a main box and replace the Pally. From what I've read, you have to do a lot of button pushing with a BST to get proper utilization out of it. SHM may be nice because of slows and DoTs which are fairly easy to hot key (I would suppose). My last thought was a Necro. I think it would help make up for some of the help I currently get from the ENC on the pulls. I understand their pets are decent DPS. I find myself calming stuff quite a bit. I don't know if FD and Tag works well with a Necro in modern content or not? Of course, my other option is just to join a guild that has people who like to do the CoF daily tasks and play my Pally as a single box main. I know it would probably take me a while to out tank a Merc, but I'd get there. Right now I'm mostly Playing on Luclin as Fuzyfut the halfling pally. Xavina the mage and Falcina the ENC are my side kicks. All my toons are in my personal guild, "Veeshans Clan." Make sure to say hello if you see me around. I'm friendly enough, but I'm a very bad boxer so I'm about 90% distracted most of the time even if I'm just trying to move around in PoK! I am looking for a guild on Luclin. However, I know that my demands may be hard to meet. I want to be able to ask all the questions I want, but I also want it to be okay if all I do for days at a time is log in an run through one daily task. My ultimate goal is to max out all three toons, but in a perfect world I'd like to only play one at a time!
I would consider bard. With pally as main your gonna be spamming a lot on him and probably neglect whatever 3rd you have, based on assumptions your just alt tabbin to box. The slow can be wonky til you get the nice Aa, but i think overall youll get more use, and if your rockin 2 wiz merc, should make quick work of HA,s before pally can get beat down.
Thanks to both of you for the Bard advice. It actually makes a lot of sense. Even if I don't do much more than /melody it could be a big asset. I'm getting pretty good at positioning mobs with the Pally. There are some pretty good guides out there on the class as well.
For lowest effort, high return Bard. If you are good at DPSing on the Paladin and can handle ALOT of clicking. Beast Lord.
Well you got a couple choices. The bard or enchanter give you mana regen, haste, and crowd control, although you have to be a lot more active with the bards crowd control. I'm not sure who's ADPS would be higher between the two if played passively. With the bard you wouldn't need to swap to it at all unless you needed to pull or CC, you'd could just use it for melody. With the enchanter you could set up a 1 button assist macro on the paladin that has pet attack (for the enchanter summoned pet, not charmed), tash the mob,s low the mob and dot the mob (or 1 nuke). Then pretty much just focus on running the mage macros and paladin. Now the chanter pet is really weak, and won't be able to take extra hits like the mage pet will, but at least the mage pet aura's will boost its DPS as well as the mage summons. You could also position the bard to auto attack for added DPS. I never have good luck with that though and just prefer the bard in the backline unless I"m actively playing it. Your shaman would provide better slows, but weaker haste. I'm not sure if their HP buffs stack with paladins or not, but good melee DPS buffs for the paladin and mage pet, and ok off heals if you need to heal with it. The wolf pet seems beefier to me than the enchanter summoned pet, but still no where near the mage pet. Again your best bet is a 1 button assist macro with slows/dots/pet attack. Could also throw in the panther line of spells which will have the paladin and all pets procing extra dmg. I think necro is going to be your weaker choice, it just brings dots and pet. Which is for sure an added damage bonus, but no real utility to the group. Well I guess that's not true, you could FD / snare split camps. So you get a puller out of the necro. I actually tried running beast lord paladin necro for awhile and what I found was with 2 melee and 2 pets, I was not having a good time I was fighting to constantly reposition the paladin and beastlord to keep them both in melee range. I did enjoy the beastlord buffs, but decided unless the beastlord is the focus character of my 3 box, then I'd prefer running a shaman or enchanter, for similar utility lines (haste, slows, debuffs). Anyway, good luck have fun. I've been doing nothing but rerolling my new heroic character group the last week trying to find that perfect fit. So try a few things out. Go kill some camps see how your comp works for you, then switch some stuff up if you need to.
are you adverse to IS Boxer? It is a boxer tool that helps a lot, but that provides no automation, and therefore is not an issue. It's main feature is key pres replication: you press 1 on one keyboard => all three instances of EQ recieves a 1. With that, you would be able to get some more dps out of all your toons, by having a good multibind on each toon. Maybe this will make you more satisfied with your enchanter. I box mage/ench/bard, and most of the time, most of their abbilities is on cooldown, and ench dps and especially adps for casters is not bad. Also, I would suggest that you use Gamparse to continously work on your output. At some point in time you will get group coh, that will make your life a lot easier.
Much appreciated. Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I actually moved to FV and I played last week with a Pally/Bard/Wizzy combo of free heriocs. I got up to level 88 so far just doing HAs and HoT tier 1 and 2 solo progression tasks (great augs!). In any area with space, I'm gotten pretty good at using autofollow to position by Bard behind the mob. Basically you just attack with the pally and step past the mob and turn around. Its tough to do in places like HoT lower. The mobs are packed close enough you generally have to take a fairly direct path to where you begin clearing a room. I've found it a good learning experience. I have noted that I need to have a combination of T5 mercs where I can going either melee/melee/healer or caster/caster/healer depending on the encounter. I had a ton of trouble with the last fight in "The Other Brother" last night. I finally figured out melee DPS mercs don't go OOM and healing potions actually make a big difference to the healers mana. Learning not to invest resources in CC in that encounter (just DPS) was also critical.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not opposed to IS Boxer. I've looked into it. right now the main issue is that it appears that I have about 40 abilities on each character, of which I use 3. I'm working on output very slowly, like occasionally turning the Bards auto attack on! Once I have a better understanding of EQ, I may add some complexity like IS Boxer.
Bard by a mile. Adps, mana regen, extra healing, swarm pets for mages storm of many. But really, you want it for selos and track.
Hi. If you're still in search of a guild that is very friendly and active in the mid-high range group game, check out Dark Dragon Society. I have most of my alts there. Edit: Sorry, just saw you moved to FV. Luclin is better, so it's a good place to keep alts.
