Question for 6 box veteran's about having a tank in the setup

Very handy and underappreciated if you take random breaks. Bard can keep a mob mezzed indefinitely.

This thread has me rethinking wiz over Druid in my setup

If you are going to add a tank to the mix, I'd strongly suggest making it the raid main. I've boxed both caster groups with charm pet and with a tank-centered, and I would have a hard time going back to a non-tank. I had very little trouble doing most group content with the charm pet tanking, but there are plenty of cases where a raid geared tank was so much nicer, especially in cases where there are no good charm pets available.

My preferred group was SK (Raid gear) / Clr / Enc / Wiz. If I could efficiently add more, I'd add a bard/mage to the mix - but the SK/CLR/ENC/WIZ was a really powerful setup from classic through omens. Can't comment beyond OOW though.

For doing group content, you can get away without a tank class all the way through around VoA/RoF timescales when you'll start to find trash mobs and especially named mobs occasionally 1-rounding your raid geared monk/ranger tank. By that time, Tank mercs are actually quite viable as your main tank... but you'll be wishing you had a real tank class.

That said, a tank that you keep max geared, augged, and AA'd through the expansions - even if it's just group geared - pays off more and more as the expansions roll in. SK is a decent class right from the start in early expansions, but by the time you get to the 80+ level caps they rise to godhood and only continue to keep getting better. It's a constant effort to keep your tank in the best group gear with the best AC augs as each expansion hits, so starting a tank late will feel like a huge undertaking.

So I guess what I'd decide if I were you, is how long you plan to stick around on Rizlona and whether you want to invest in a high maintenance character that will pay off big time in later expansions.

On Phinny I ran a Monk+sham duo until mercs came out, then switched to monk/bard... Very comfortably able to do most group content throughout the expansions. If I could have added more boxes I would have been able to do all progression missions/etc with my monk as the tank. As I said in my previous post, keeping a tank geared up is an investment that pays off big in later expansions. Even a group geared SK will absolutely demolish your raid geared Monk/Ranger when it comes to tanking once you are at the 85+ level caps.

Yep. Just have to remember to manage the push.

You will try to run your box team anywhere without group invis song 1 time with invis randomly dropping on random boxes, then do it once with the invis song, and you will never drop the Bard again.

The group will need to invis. You can fix not having a bard with cloudy pots, but that gets expensive in the early eras if you do not want to farm for money and you have to be really on the spot with GINA setup on all accounts and fast on the keys. It is a huge pain in the . I've tried both ways and feel the bard is necessary for my enjoyment for group invis alone. Eventually a ranger gets an instant invis for the whole group by AA, but I think that is level 70 or 75. A long time to wait.

The thought of no snare in group fills me with terror. The charm pet will sometimes path really badly and completely fail to finish the mob off. I am a huge fan of redundancy in snare & slow and customarily setup my go macros so every mob is getting a real snare and slow as the group focus shifts to them as well as having the bard pbaoe slow and snare everything always. I guess a real dps main might make this a little better, but I'd never consider making a group without snare.

A ranger is not a tank. I know lots that tried to be, and I guess if you define tanking as having agro they sorta do it. Your healer will not agree. The mitigation will never be close to a real tanking class. That said, I've seen groups that succeed very well without a tank, even tho that is not my flavor it absolutely works in a lot of situations. I've seen monks and rangers do a wide range of stuff with just a shaman box. I'd guess with a full group behind them there would not be all that many things you really cannot do. The 6 box groups with tanks will take down old raid content at least one era before you can do it, maybe more. You cannot charm tank raid content at all. There would probably be similar problems doing BiC and Epic 2.0's in era, you would need a tank a few times. But all said and done, you can get by fine 90% if not 95% of the time without one with good play if you want it that way.

Warriors defensive matters hardly at all when trying to one group hard stuff like motm raid mobs. Defensive will run out long before the mob is killed. That's true throughout TLPs. If you need defensive to hang in, you'll die without it. If it doesn't have MOTM, then it's just not that hard. The -1 DI and higher AC makes more of a real difference.

The level 100 game has nothing to do with early era TLPs. A group geared tank will struggle trying to one group MOTM mobs unless it's 2-3 expansions old. The gap only increases starting in velious.

I played WAR CLR BRD RNG RNG RNG from basically end of Kunark through level 85 in my last TLP run. I did replace two rangers with zerks once they were available as my melee centric team was too heavily reliant on having 8 melee weapons and 3 bows vs sword/board, 2 dual wield weapons, a bow and 2 2-handers.

I only used ISB to box with keybinds / in game macros so I’m sure there are uncomplicated ways to box a melee setup with other software.

I will tell you this having grinded a charm group on selos... we still had a warrior tank; but he chain pulled with a slot for raids to gear up late. But from my setup... I enjoyed having a tank to “drive” through much more than everyone else doing some things while driving through a charm pet. It probably comes down to preference and setup, but outside of maybe one progression flagging event or two... my group never really struggled and my CLR was my raiding main. Warrior just picked up rots and proved super useful for off-night raiding and split raids when we were short main tanks.

GL with the next TLP; I’ve got young kids and no energy to dedicate to my preferred hardcore play style.

In classic sure, i'll probably just use coth in kunark+.

But I did decide to include a bard over a second mage. I hope I don't regret it.

Grats on the crotch fruit, i am on my last of 5 still in the house!

I don't think anyone said anything about MTOM mobs. I might be wrong. I'm too lazy to go back and reread the thread.

I'd argue Furious has more of an impact than Defensive. Having precious seconds at the start of a hard encounter to position, debuff, and slow is invaluable when 1 person is controlling all those tasks.

With my SK tank on Coirnav I've successfully 6 boxed things like Drusella, Tipt and MPG trials in era, and I would swap my bleeding edge geared/AAed SK for an equal Warrior in a heartbeat. The SK literally contributes nothing over an equal Warrior when backed up my 5 other toons.

There will be many times where you won't be able to CotH. Invis your box group down to somewhere nasty, and the moment you pop off invis the mobs attack. Without your whole team there to handle it, the Mage will just go splat.

Are you really going to CotH 5 group members across every single KoS zone every time you run through them? Do you know how long that takes? Do you think you'll be able to CotH your box crew to the entrance of Ssra while that zone line is constantly being trained by everyone else running there like fools?

Boxers unanimously love Bards. You will too. I promise.

You can generally do fine with a lot of the content without a pure tank, but there are things you will struggle with, without one. Underfoot for one, and there are some missions here and there that really need a tank. Me and my buddy will play a BST, Ranger, Ranger (box), Druid (box), Cleric Merc x 2 and we will hit the occasional task that we can't do and Underfoot . . . .

On magefire, I boxed paladin, druid, enchanter, necro.

Would pull with paladin, and once he lost agro to enchanter pet, would go pull next mob. Between paly and druid, heals/rez was not a problem, and necro FD was a nice little bonus if there was a wipe. Really liked this combo because if there was a bad enough baddy in the camp, then having a semi-proper tank was nice. Most of the time, was just lull pulling with paladin. The LOH was nice since I was trying to get max damage out of chanter pet. If I felt like 6 boxing, I would have simply added 2 mages for DPS/Coh.