so getting tired of running a complete caster group. great dps and fun but I guess I kinda need the tank aspect . been looking at what i want in a team and figured it was an actual tank, healer of some sort, snare, ports, slow and good dps. killing mobs fast is fun. So figured i would try a sk/dru/bst/mage. 2 mages in a group is good for the synergy but having 3 pet classes and farming the em items kinda sucks. but my end goal is to raid the bst so kind of have to keep it. thought about maybe switching sk for pally since undead are fun to slay but sk's are kind an all around not just killing undead. so would sk/dru/bst/mage be a viable team for for progressing to end game and also for doing progression? thanks for any input in advance
Yep, can do it all easily. I run Mage-Mage-Dru-Pal and works well on all end-game stuff. Play the paladin as a 2H cleric mostly and let the pets tank. I step in and tank/disc when i need to. For missions, i usually ranged/pet tank and let paladin pick up adds (or deal with mechanics, like Shei in TOL). Very low stress and i still get like 90% effectiveness out of mage-mage-dru boxes since i'm not constantly spamming or dancing with death on a player tank. You'll probably want the SK tanking in your crew. SK will bring a lot of mana regen to dru/bst/mag that other tanks won't.
1 mage can be swapped with a beastlord. Beastlords are walking mana-banks, your druid will enjoy! Perhaps with Alternate Persona it may be convenient.
sk/dru/bst/mage will be fine. In some fights with a lot of AE damage (ex: Claws of Veeshan's Crusader's Mission) I think the druid will have trouble keeping your team alive. You can shore that up by either changing your SK to a paladin (which will make it harder to maintain aggro on 4+ mobs, less DPS, and less mana for your druid) or changing the druid to a shaman. I'd recommend sk/shm/bst/mag, but your group works fine too.
I'm already not taking a liking to the druid to much. sucks at healing since it takes so long to cast, not to mention its a mana hungry class. luckily sk has lifetaps. I'm really just using druid for ports nuking tracking and using the nukes to lower resist for mage. shm are great and love them completely but with bst some of it just seems redundant. I figure maybe towards later xpacs might just use 2 merc healers or just pet tank and use bst as a healer on missions if need be. not ideal but seems it could work. I want to make a pally but first got to get this team to a good point before starting something else.
Warrior and 3 bards. dps check cc check pulling check charm? check forage something? check tracker? check easy to do the dps? /melody check check check check easy to not full wipe? /fading checks dps bonus from being same class? check slow dps? check snares? check easy burn AAs? check pretty much all instant, not no mage AA where its like 4 second cast for a few of them. Takes forever to burn. cleric mercs are fine, don't need to do healer See bards, pick lock? How does that make sense? Wizard manipulating the lock that makes more sense Gonna play this guitar and this lock unlock Forage? A muscian foraging? how does that make sense? Beastlord can't forage that makes more sense. Gonna play the flute and habanero peppers will be foraged Track? A muscian tracking? what how? how does that make sense? Again, beastlord, pet sniff out the enemies Gonna sing and enemies will shout or something I can track them. They most likely gave bards these things because they had there hands full with instruments, couldn't attack while playing the flute. Now daggers and what not and now, pants are wind instrument. https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=81430 wind instrument, big farts shoes are singing instruments, idk tapping foot makes you sing better sleeves are string instrument? Bards they couldn't attack so they gave them stuff. Now they can attack and they still have all the benefits. Oh my point was, Wizards. Mages can do frontal AE beam fine Wizards do it, blinded. take damage, something bad happens. SK's do instant big burn attack many benefits Wizards, long cast big burn attack. Got resisted. wizards full of nerfs and no benefits bards full of benefits and no nerfs Wizards should have eye of zomm, ports them to where the eye goes. instant movement portals. go through walls. eye of zomm picks locks via holding a lockpick but its not holding a lockpick its auto whatever you click on if it was a door then assume you have a lockpick in your hand, only the wizard one does that though. Wizards beam they should go back to unlimited targets. Blinded for a reason. You nerf and you keep blind? Thats what I mean by full of nerfs no benefits. Wizards should get a turn off and on AA where there single target nukes do AE damage. Multitarget attacks, do AE damage too, so 8 AE nukes if hit 8 targets. Clusterbomb AA, can be the name. Wizards should be AE king, but they got all these nerfs, they aint AE king anymore. Honestly ranger AE's better and they get riptose and all these tank em while AEing benefits. Headshot for single targets. Wizard loses to ranger - AE or single targets Wizard loses to SK - big burns fast Wizard loses to mage - AE, in general their dps spells aren't that much greater, no pets Wizard loses to rogue/bard - scouting, why bother with eye of zomm Wizard loses to necro - kiting, soloplay Wizard box loses to many - lot of effort to keep the damage up, ex. how you gonna pay attention to the next spell is free ex. how you gonna pay attention to the next spell is twincast do a macro, oh next is twincast, ah the next macro is wildmagic baby nuke, spending twincast on a baby nuke? use ethereal. spending the free spell on a baby nuke, spend it on an ethereal. You can't really do that with boxing and just pressing the macro and forgetting about it for 30 seconds. Lots of effort with wizards and boxing. not like bard just turn on melody and autoatack and forget about it benefit to bard autoattack vs wizard high maintenance not really that much great. bards get finishing blow, pretty useful, wizard nothing. Boxing you want to make use of that finishing blow, so have a lot of classes that have it. Think about rangers too. Rangers do: Self DS Rangers do: DS that is just as good as druid/mage DS Rangers do: Ranger specific DS which is 1/3 as good the druid/mage DS again Headshot instant kills Finishing blow Riptose Can take hits Easy free target AE damage they can heal forage/track easy to maintain, just /autofire on cast your DoTs, if you forget about its ok, autofire is on, I believe fire does finishing blows too, you got headshots with them. Your out of range of any AE/DoT damage too. They can fight melee style too. You need the mez though so thats where bards shine, they can do everything plus CC, or charm a mob if you can't CC it and use it as a meatshield. No negatives to having many bards too. Nothing wrong with bard going all in DPS songs. People underestimate or forget about classes can do insane damage if they are paired with same class. You lose if you don't do more than 1 bard. Why something else? tank merc healer merc, bard does everything else besides that.
What level is the druid? At 75 and at 95 they get two new lines of quick-cast heals, which become their go-to heal spells. On mine, I don't even always keep the stock, slow-cast heal memmed.
agree with Tucoh, only thing though, druid might have some troubles ( even with 2 healer mercs ) to heal through some stuff. i speak from experience, my wife mains a druid, i main a bst and we did a lot with a friend that mains a rogue and brought a mage alt as well, the mains being raid geared with max aas and all. so i'd prefer a shaman instead of a druid ( we do have a friend that brought a shaman at times and the difference was very noticable ) but, well, she's my wife you know some people will tell you there's a lot of overlap between bst and shaman, but they work very nice together in 1 group.
I love Uber's posts. They are a lot like the visions of ancient Greek Oracles - you have to sift through the alliterative language to solve the riddle and find the wisdom and truth in it.
Oh there is talk about druids? Those issues they mentioned about druids, takes long time to cast and what not. Thats how I feel about Mage AAs, when I'm about to burn all of them. Each AA seems to take forever. Thats why I say bard. You can do like 10 different AA burns in like 3 seconds. Mage do frenzy nuke or whatever takes like 5 seconds to do that AA. So easy to play, boxing if some class is taking too long to do something its not a good box class, you should not be worrying is that cast time over yet or what. As for healers, just use cleric mercs, you'll get ticked off at times if you do healing yourself and you didn't change to your healer in time, so your tank died. Healer merc is always on point, might not be able to keep up at times though in tough fights. Some fights you gotta go outside the box, use a healing potion. Use a charmed as meat shield sacrifice until you get all the debuffs on that tough mob and what not. One thing you don't want to happen in boxing is getting full wiped. Tough for that to happen with 3 bards. Bards are escape artists. Why? Most likely because they couldn't do anything since holding instrument back in the days, and they give them all buffs. Then they change it so they can melee and instruments are like shoes and gloves pants. Pants is your wind instrument. But they don't balance so they left with buffs and no negatives. Meanwhile Wizards, nerf them and they don't balance. Nerfed beam and still blinds you still does self damage, justs a lil bit more than a mage beam which does not blind no self damage, no snaring you either. Manaburn takes long time. Got resisted. SK DT, instant. Big damage, not resisted. Extra benefits on top of it too. This game they balance weird. Right now you want full bards or all bards and a tank. Let the healer merc heal, thats tedious stuff. If you go healer, go cleric, in combat rez. Group over time heal. Group heals. Those nasty nameds usually hit everyone in the group so you just want to be good at group heals really.
The shaman and bst overlap a little, but I don't think it's a big deal. They both provide haste and slow, but not much overlap beyond that. Ports become increasingly less important due to the many ways you can get around. You can get a sense of that from this map: https://www.eqmaps.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/World-2019-04-17-GMM.png Without a druid you can quickly get to anywhere there is a PoK book or Guild Hall portal icon. Having a porter just saves a zone or two. The shaman's aura gives haste to the swarm pets for beastlords and mages (although they are being heavily stagflated in the next expansion), and the shaman's epic 2.0, roar of the lion etc benefit the beastlord/mage pets and shadowknight melee. Their DoTs are effective and can be put onto a social macro effectively, druid DPS is fine too. I don't have solid numbers but I'd contend that a shaman provides higher overall DPS to your group than a druid. But really, the shaman is there to heal, and they are much more effective than druids.
Shaman would be far more powerful than a druid in your team but you'd give up ports. Tank doesn't matter so much, whatever flavor you'd prefer. Beast and mage are great for any group so keep em. Oh, and ignore ukk or just read his posts for fun. Don't take advice from him.
I've never really played a druid enough to be able to compare with a shaman. I have bias of course, towards shaman. But having at least played a wizard for a long time as well, the ports would be difficult to give up.
I would go with 3, if your alt tabbing like most people. 4 is going to start holding you back. If you do do 4 you gotta play a class that is very very quick and simple. Thats why I say bard. alt tab press 2 macro, /atk on /melody 1 2 3 4 5 /shout AA not sure if /pause breaks melody, but shout AA is 12 seconds, so put another shout in it have 2 burn buttons, does 5-6 AA burns, they are instant. Not like mages where you do some frenzy spell attack it takes 5 seconds 5 seconds is too long to be in 1 character when your playing 4 characters If you have journyman mercs all 3 characters, do 3 box. If your F2P approach, apprentice mercs are pretty bad so do 4 box then. 4 box gonna hold you up though, especially on those quests, gather 12 materials of this then it unlocks gather 8 materials, cannot preloot. zone is locked unless you do the progression. give an item to someone, they aggro now. they dead, takes 30 minutes respawn for your next 3 characters. See how its holding you back now. Also, you gotta be quick alt tabbing with 4. Its not really good QoL on your wrists. If you got 3 journymans just do 3 box.
Love when troll types who just embarrass themselves with every post start going in at other people of their same ilk. Pot calling the kettle black oh the irony /popcorn
I have a ton of alts and 6 accounts. I find SK, bard, mage, rogue, ranger, shaman, the best combo for most. Especially if you find a camp that you can headshot/assassinate!! I usually find a camp with those kinds of mobs and the dps is insane. Shaman can heal perfectly with anything. I have thrown in a BL, Berzerker, necro also at times. I like the necro solo for sure, but with HS/ mobs, can't beat the combo I mainly use. BL dps just doesn't cut it for me and I would rather have a shaman. Berzerkers need a lot of work still. Maybe with the new ratio weapons, they will be back on top? Limited to 4. I would probably do Bard(to pull), mage(pet tank), shaman(healing, slow, dots), ranger(easy to box and good dps with bow). Mage pets can tank as good as any raid tank can, especially with decent EM.
You can say that again. My tests show a minor improvement in HPs from the 120 to 125 pets(like 10% max, without the new aas). Last expansion(well two ago), they got a massive boost(like 60% or something crazy like that), I think it was a mistake maybe? Think they are trying to fix that this expansion, but it's kinda BS. These new pets have to last 2 expansions. Also, the base pets now have massively more hps than they used to unfocused and the focus items add way less than the did. Before, the top raid focus added like 100%+ hps, now it's like 30% more maybe for the top focus, from zero EM. They did that before and I think it's wrong. Group weapons, compared to raid weapons are much worse. Raid focused pets should be much better than group focused pets, not 10%.
