Currently I 3 box druid (main), mage, enchanter. All 3 are 105 with 14K+ AAs and EoK T2 group geared. I run all 3 accounts on one monitor and use alt tab and macros to box. All 3 are all access. I am thinking of switching one of them out for a Warrior because I want to play some melee and get a real tank for a change. With the upcoming Nov double exp bonus, I want to get a heroic Warrior and bring him up to 105 quickly. But I cannot decide which toon to switch out. Druid - ports and track are too awesome for hunter. Also my druid is my top dps toon currently (*cough* druid dots are op *cough*) Mage - because I don't use boxing software, COH is an integrated part for breaking into deep dungeons with see invisible mobs. I usually invisible my mage, run her to camp, then COH the other toons in. If I run into see invisible mob, my pet can tank while I COH the rest of the crew in. I find auto follow breaks too easily, or I'm doing it wrong. Enchanter - CC, memblur, etc enables me to break difficult camps. And chanter slow, adps, and even dps are great right now. I don't think I can take T2 namers that have multiple adds without him. I can't decide which toon to drop. Currently since mage pet does tanking, most likely the Warrior will replace her as tank. But I find myself feeling I can't live without COH. I know I can use mage to break into deep dungeons first, COH crew in, drop campfire, then log on Warrior to port to campfire. But the idea of logging in and out toons seem kinda time consuming. Also I don't have a lot of time at night to play (work, family, etc), so every minute count. Which toon do you guys think I should drop? Or should I just keep the existing crew? This is purely for group content and progression. I won't have the time to do any raid soon, if ever.
Take out the mage. Up your minimum fps that is deep into the settings so that autofollow works better. My comp is ok and min 40 max 60 works fine generally. alt + o > display tab > advance settings button in the lower right corner > the two slide bars for background fps and max fps (or something similar, just going from memory). druid + enc is strong for adps and dps as far as casters go. But I guess to be fair maybe wait until the expac releases. If druids turn south, ditch the druid as healer mercs will do well with a real tank.
Tanks are PITA if you don’t main them. All the aug farming and quest really take lots of time. As who to swamp out... just box 4 with two healer mercs
Nothing against 4 boxing. I added a free account to my 3 box set up and am trying out different mixes myself. Liking the SK so far. If he works out I will make him a paid account later. Its a little cumbersome but you get used to it and my boxing set up is just like what you have on your computer. Sometimes I leave the druid home if I just want a quick HA or something close by.
Tank + Chanter + (a)DPS is the way to go. I've grouped with you before Poxxie and have seen you around plenty on Xegony. As others have mentioned, i would drop the mage. I run an SK/Chanter/Mage combo. There isn't anything i cannot take on. I don't know how well druids do as a main, or just well played since I don't play one, but with a real tank, a Chanters CC / buffs / Runes / Surprisingly good dps, and the mage with all of his DPS, and pet back ups, and CoH, it's a good group
Thank you everyone for your valuable input! Appreciate all your thoughts. And hello to you too Treiln. I haven't considered adding a 4th box before. Thank you for the suggestion. Currently, I feel like controlling 3 toons is already pretty intense sometimes. Especially during bad pulls or sudden adds. I am looking for more of a relaxing gaming experience while still being able to blow through group content. 3 mercs on auto-play gives me more breathing room for mistakes. Also, the cost of subbing a 4th account along with expansion purchase might be too expensive. My wife will probably be very mad if she sees the bill, lol. After some consideration, I plan to stick back to 3 boxing my druid, mage, and chanter combo for now. Their AAs still need a lot of work. Hopefully my mage pet can tank RoS content with the current em23 earring and max pet defense AAs. If not, I will be forced to change the mage out for a real tank. Loosing the ability to COH the crew will be a huge PITA. If anyone have any other thoughts, please let me know. Always looking to improve my game. Thanks in advance.
The most powerful combination is by far: war/dru/enc 4 boxing would be good too, but you just need to decide whether the added hassle is worth whatever you get out of replacing a caster DPS merc with a mage. Note that we don't know how tough mage pets will be in RoS, but if they are in line with EoK or even merely moderately better, your group's power will be significantly higher with a warrior once he becomes geared. I expect that you'll go from being able to take on singles and maybe two weaker mobs to being able to pull entire groups of mobs.
The added bonus really with a played tank class is the ability to “tank” multiple mobs while cc is working. With your set up the chanter should pull sinhles all day, mage pet tanks with ease. Now if you add a 4th, the druid and mage can be hot keyed and you will want to maintain the tank and chanter. I box pal/druid/shaman but only the shaman is on a diff computer (cruddy laptop). When i pull extras I get them cc’d with root between all 3. If i ran a 4th account it would on that laptop and be something I could tab to and just press a button tab back. Your current set up is more than enough today, tomorrow is close but only time will tell.
Can you elaborate a little? Why the druid is the best. Currently I am trying Sk Chanter, I can't decide on a third Mage, Beast or Wiz. I know Sk is a little more busy over the warrior, I thought about changing him out, but I have too much time into the SK, so I am sticking with him.
It's just the best given his choice of war + dru vs mage vs enc. SKs are a great class, I wouldn't swap it for the warrior unless you just wanted to try something new. For a third being added to a SK/Chanter duo, the big question is whether you want to become responsible for healing as well as tanking/DPS. If the answer is yes, I'd say druid/shaman are roughly equal in contribution. If the answer is no, I'd say you should look into seeing if you can put together a group that's centered around wizard mercs triggering the wizard alliance: http://www.raidloot.com/Spells.aspx?name=frostbound alliance I don't know much about it, but if I had a sk/enc/wiz I'd give it a shot.
Hey all! I'm looking at into boxing with a druid as well: so many people here are saying Druid is a must use. Why do you find that true? What kind of mileage are you able to get out of a Druid box that makes it special? I've only played one solo before and I'm learning to box on the fly just recently. Most people I know box a mage due to the pet tanking.
A deuid brings awesome dos in forms of aa, dots, dd’s. Add in the quality of healing, debuffs, track, ports, and over all utility they are a sought after bix toon. Bery easy to set up a couple hot buttons and they still do good. No matter what tho a boxed toon is never as good as a played character. I bet I box my shaman and druid to maybe 10% of their potential, yet I am able to get alot accomplished.
Besides the overall utility, dru/sha have really good DPS right now, and can heal very well. A dru/sha makes a great backup to a cleric merc on tough fights, and can easily switch to DPS on easy fights
If you think about the overall time you spend in EQ, from logging in to logging out, a significant portion of the time is not about killing stuff. For example, running across zones, tracking down namers, doing quests, getting rots, etc. My guesstimate of time spent killing at a stable camp is maybe around 70%. What the Druid is good at is making the 30% a whole lot faster with port and track, while still pulling its weight for the rest of the 70% in terms of dps, heals, buffs and debuffs. IMHO, track is a must if you want to do achievements or hunting down specific mob/gear. If so, that leaves you with Druid, Bard, and Ranger. Ports and port group to bind enables me to zoom in and out zone quickly. Evac helps save from wipes, which wipes can take 10 to 15mins to recover. Only Druid and Wiz have them. If you assume track and ports are a must, the question is, what is the optimal setup? For 3 box, after filling in the tank spot, you are left with 2 remaining spots. IMO, the choice of tank dictates the remaining to spots. If you choose a real tank, then you want to optimize for melee damage. So for a tracker, that probably means a Bard. For port/evac, neither Druid or wiz helps with Melee damage much, so arguably it is sub-optimal. On the other hand, if you use pet tank, IMO only mage pet is viable for the hardest group content. So you are building a caster team to synergies with mage. But since pet cannot really tank multiple mobs (no AE aggro), you need CC, which mean bard or chanter. If you pick bard as CC and tracker, then doing a wiz for ports is viable. But I personally find bard takes more attention to box, and arguably not as good as enchanter for casters adps. Comparatively, if you choose an enchanter for CC, then your porter needs to be a Druid, since wiz doesn't have track. And so that's why I arrived at a mage, enchanter, druid team. The ease of travel, track, CC, evac, COH, and still put out good dps made me able to gear out all my toons in EoK T2 group gear within the two weeks time of rare spawn bonus. For pure dps parse, a melee team is probably better. But if you count the overall time spent in EQ along with the ease of boxing a caster team, I'll say the utility out-weights the dps differences. Just my 2 cents.
I have Druid (main), Enchanter, Magician. I have a Warrior on the Magician's account that I can swap in for different situations, but I usually don't play him because I don't like to box melee characters in general (constant need to re-position is not fun when boxing). If you want to do this the "right" way, your druid will need to step down from Main status and your toons should be following your warrior around as he kills things.
As others have said, SK/Magi/Enc. Not much I can't drop with that set up, its easy to move, it can pull well (if I need to), tank like crazy and burn things to the ground pretty quickly.
My favorite 3 box team is warrior, chanter, shaman. Since the DoT revamp, the shaman is actually good dps on a longer named fight, given the tradeoffs of 3 boxing. I also have a Wiz and Mage on the same account as the Shaman, and find that I need to pay full attention on the Wiz or Mage to get decent burn dps mashing my multibind keys. But the Shaman does pretty well just layering on the DoTs with a one press social button. This frees up attention time for me to get better dps out of the chanter and warrior. I don't use third party boxing software, so maybe things are different if you are able to use the same multibind key on multiple characters simultaneously. The shaman setup is also great for survival with the buffs, debuffs, healing and rez. The shaman is less ideal for shorter trash fight dps, but it does not really matter to min-max killing trash.
2 box, warrior shaman. 3 box, warrior, chanter, druid...switch out mercs as needed. So much has changed in the last 15 years, shaman are only good for one buff now; other classes out perform (buffwise). Poxxie made a lot of great points, you gotta weigh the importance of COH. I still need AAs so killing my way into everything is still a positive, don't need COH and don't need mage tanking with warrior in hand. Porting is important, CC + haste + slow also important, dps and heals can be had from mercs. If you run into a named, swap out mercs, if you are blowing lesson, druids can heal with mercs blazing dps. Currently have 110 ranger for HS to PL toons, but that limits the scope of mobs to kill. Good point by Poxxie, how much time is spent earning xp vs running around or recovering from a mistake. Appreciate this post, I've been earning and learning my way to 110. Thanks for starting the thread Poxxie, even though I'm late to the party.
