3 box Setup for box TLP

The one advantage of going knight tank is that everyone and their brother who is boxing goes for a warrior tank. (Including me usually.) It can be hard to win spots on a raid guild roster as a war. Especially if you aren't super high attendance.

I still feel a knight tank is just fine. I don't think there's raid targets that you could take with 1 group that a warrior would let you beat that an SK or Pally will not. I have no experience past ldon so maybe that's different later ... But my 2 cents, knights offer more utility than a warrior

Sk/Shm/Bard....love it, absolutely rocks.

I also spent quite a few years boxing on TLPs and my original 3-box was Enc(raid main)/Dru/Mag(thru lvl 70 on phinigel) and I agree that is was very strong and really enjoyed playing it and the majority of any group content out there can be completed by this comp. Its really nice to play point on the enchanter and control the flow with all the enchanter tools with minimal activity from the dru/mage. Solid synergy from the 3 classes with ports, DS, coth, malo line(for charm), etc etc. I found that throughout my time playing this comp, I found a fairly decent handful of times where I wanted/needed a real tank(either MOTM or no good charm pet available).

For my 2nd full box crew on Selo for 1-70, I went with SK(raid main) / CLR / ENC / WIZ and it felt significantly stronger. Your point about being busy at the same time is indeed very important and worth consideration. It definitely took some adjustment to shift the enchanter from playing point to being a 2nd box, and running the SK as the point character - but ultimately once I got comfortable it did indeed feel stronger. While my druid was a great pair with the original comp, the Cleric just felt infinitely better since the primary role of the healer in a box comp is just that, a healer. And obviously cleric heals, especially 1-70 expansions, are just so much better than a druid (CH for charm pets specifically). There are obviously tradeoffs with either comp, but having played both extensively; if I had to do it again, I'd still go with the SK / CLR / ENC / x over DRU / MAG / ENC if you plan to be completely self-sustaining. Things I missed the most about the dru/enc/mage comp were the strong ability to powerlevel, malo spell line, and coth - but having a raid-geared tank felt like the biggest differentiator in terms of power level and ability to do difficult group content.

edit: just to clarify - I only have experience with 1-70 content and can't intelligently comment on more recent content

I've gone back and forth with adding a mage or a wizard to a sk/shaman.

The mage would add sustained dps, pet gear later on, decent nukes, DS, coh. The air pet would add random stuns, but I don't think they would be reliable for healing/gating mobs. I think the mage would be better for keeping up constant exp while leveling (DS alone is nice for that).

The wizard would add top tier burst dps, ports, stuns on command. It's also attractive due to being even less attention needing than a mage and you don't have to worry about sending the pet in at the beginning every time, rain/nuke can wait for the sk and shaman to do their things.

Overall I'm leaning toward a wizard due to stuns/ports/low attention, but I worry about mana efficiency compared to a mage and resists. I mostly want to be able to explore dungeon crawling to see things I never experienced back in the day since we were more focused on a few good exp camps and raids.

I'd be more concerned about lack of pulling ability with this combination than wizard mana efficiency. You'll be relying purely on the SK to pull. They can, but not quickly, and not without dying some. I'd consider cleric instead of shaman if you are going with the wiz, so you can rez the sk when FD fails. Otherwise every time you have a botched pull during a dungeon crawl you'll have to evac and start over.

You'd be much better off with an SK in that group for many reasons.

1. Snare. Not having snare, especially in classic is a tremendous pain in the rear. One runner in lower guk and it's train city.
2. Feign Death pulling, as you're not going with any hard CC that box is going to get overwhelmed in a lot of places where pac starts to no longer work.
3. Paladins are bordering on horrible in classic, SKs are never bad.
4. Skill budget redundancies. All classes in EQ have have positives and negatives, and for every positive they have, they pay for it with a negative. Because your cleric and Palie are stacking the same buff and heal lines, you're wasting a lot of the skill budget you could have in a 3 box.

If you go with a necro, you could solve the snare problem, but you're still wasting skill budget there. The problem with necro, is that they are a fairly "busy" class, unlike say a mage. Especially if you going to be using it to for CC and snares. It's not like a chanter where you can lock down a group and go make a sandwich, you have to stay on top of it.

P.S. SK/Cleric/Chanter is bulletproof really, and pretty easy to argue the best 3 classes in classic. I ended up liking my chanter/druid/mage because I had a lot of fun charming, and I hate having a box team without ports. I'm a sucker for a druid in just about any box configuration for that reason. Less raw damage than a wiz ...well....more or less, but a metric ton more utility. You certainly will be able to do a couple of things with the SK that you can't do without a real tank, but it's such a small percentage of EQ time spent it didn't really bug me. If I was going to do something that tough I'd just group a tank. I would also argue that there are a lot of places where a chanter is actually a much better tank than any player ever would be in era via charms. BoT comes to mind. Anywhere that a chanter can get a reliable on level mob to charm, they will wipe the floor with a real tank in early expansions.

There are a ton of viable combos, you just need to pay attention to overlapping abilities, and trying to get the most out of your choices.

Well the other idea I had was monk/shaman/druid. To be clear, I'm not looking to do current dungeons, probably at least an expansion behind if not more since I level slowly due to play time. I've duoed the sk/shaman leveling but my dungeon forays usually ended with death when I got impatient leveling up and tried level appropriate dungeons. I'd like a reliable trio, but with the caveat that the third box I just won't be able to put much attention into it. Its not easy 3 boxing in the recliner with the main on the 60 inch tv and a laptop on either side lol (it'd be impossible without usb keypads heh).