With the change to the chase items no longer being class/archetype locked I'm looking to roll some personas! I've been riding the mage train the last few years and it looks like EQ is becoming melee quest again? Right now I've got shd brd mag sha mag mag I'm leaning toward: shd brd ber sha mnk bst Any thoughts are welcome, but I have a few specific questions: If I don't use poisons, what provides better melee synergy, rogue or monk? I don't want to double up on classes, but how good would replacing the mnk with a second bst be? How important is it for rogues to face the back of a mob these days? If I swapped out the mnk for a war or another shd, how good would their DPS be given the amount of ADPS available? I've always contemplated the idea of doing tank swaps in a group, where I could have massive defensive uptime by rotating tanks, would probably be more trouble than it's worth
I'd consider SHD,BRD,BER,SHM,Ranger,BST Ranger is a way better adps than a monk. Top level monks are awesome dps (looking at Ganrn), but a ranger is not shabby either. And extra ranger buffs/AA's will bump up the group dps. Also, ranger long-duration snare and calm may prove to be useful as well as range dps will be better for those special encounters. I play tankless so I play BST,BRD,BER,SHM,RNG,BST quite often. 2 beastlords are mean! Group's dps is fantastic, both steady and burst. Both rogues and monks do not significantly boost group dps, at least not in a fully-stacked melee group like that, imho. Second beastlord would be an interesting alternative to the monk, but I'd go with a ranger instead. Rogues can backstab in the face, but, of course, attacking from behind is notably better. Monks are supreme dps on their own. A second tank would be a dps downgrade. Although, you already got 2 tanks - your shadowknight and a massive warder. Unless your shadowknight really tries the warder will out-aggro it if needed.
I think you are in for a hard reality check moving from caster group to a melee group. Your current group requires almost no position. - pull to group - hit key to assist+ spam - alt tab to bard and move them into position - spam, spam, spam. Melee groups are going to be a lot trickier. You're giving up CoH so you have to move the entire group together. Everything but the shaman has to be pointed at the mob and with in range. Preferably attacking from behind. On top of all that the beastlord is a PITA to micromanage their mana. I've tried playing them a couple different times and I can do great DPS for about 3-5 min then I'm OOM and DPS drops to meh. Berserkers are fairly straight forward. You can set up two mash keys and be pretty much done. Monks are similar to berserkers except they have 4x 30s burns in stead of one 2-3 min burn. Rogues can also be setup with two smash keys and get fairly good results.
My 3rd persona crew is basically your exact proposed setup: shd/bst/ber/clr/mnk/brd (the cleric will be swapped with my 125 shaman, its just leveling a clr for the heck of it). However, they are still 120 and slowly leveling (basically just doing daily lesson) so I don't have an informed opinion on the power of shd/ber/mnk yet. At 120 with the clr they are decently strong. In terms of what I do have, my old main team of war/brd/rog/shm/bst/pal does pretty well - I haven't tried any burn scenarios, but it sustains around 5m dps in a 30 minute lesson. They are still in largely NoS gear and have room to gain probably 200-300 hdex per char. My prime caster team seems to be war/brd/wiz/dru/wiz/enc which does around the same sustain and burns through HAF in about a minute. The casters don't have evolvers because lol archetypes. Never tried a mage stack. I'd like to finish leveling and try all sorts of combos, including slotting in a ranger somewhere, but it's gonna be a while. The leveling really takes a toll.
I've thought about doing caster but kinda miss my melee group. Why do you have a warrior as the tank in this group? If you've got a video of you burning through HAF in a minute I'd love to see it. Spazu posted a vid of him doing HAF and it's remarkable.
It cranks dps much harder than my paladin. My SK isn't up to level yet but I suspect it could be a stronger choice. Sadly I don't have a recording setup and don't plan on setting it up. Don't have a monk estimate, but I looked back at rog synergy numbers cause they're easy to find. For war/brd/rog/shm/bst/pal I get close to 300k dps from rog synergy alone. Since it seems to be affected by spell crit AAs, hybrids and casters do more. It's around 30k for pure melee, 45-50k for hybrids, 60k for shm, and 12k for pets. By the way if you're entertaining the idea of rogue or ranger, make sure your shaman is BIG. The "slam" ability is the difference between proccing and not proccing rog/rng synergy. You will miss out on this if you have an iksar, frog, etc shaman.
Well if you use a sham it is no longer a melee team. If you want a melee team you will need someone that can heal the group which would mean a SK would be best I think for solo healing themselves with bst / bard slowing. A pally would give the tank the ability to heal the rest of the group but then bst also has some weak heals in the cast of another person taking some damage. If you do plan on using a sham don't call it a melee team because a sham is a wis caster now a melee. Pal would be better healing for low level I think but sk would be better healing high level I believe, but I don't know if you intend to be clearing named in ToV or later without a wis caster healing the group.
I've never looked at monk synergy but it seems interesting. I believe all the other melee synergies offer a flat damage bonus, except for berserker I suppose that increases crippling blows. I wonder how it parses out for a group with high ADPS. It doesn't look like it has stacking issues except for the berserker's mangling / disconcerting disciplines. Master's Synergy V Target: Caster Group Duration: 18s (3 ticks) Max Hits: 105 Outgoing Hits Affected By Buff 1: Increase Base 1H Blunt Damage by 34% 2: Increase Base 1H Slash Damage by 34% 3: Increase Base 2H Blunt Damage by 34% 4: Increase Base 2H Slash Damage by 34% 5: Increase Base Hand to Hand Damage by 34% 6: Increase Base 1H Pierce Damage by 34% 7: Increase Base 2H Pierce Damage by 34%
It's better from behind, but I generally don't bother in group content. It's too much of a pain in the to get things pulled into just the right spot to hit them from behind. It's easier to just pile the melee up and just pull all the mobs and turn around on the pile of melee and attack away. They die fast enough that it doesn't matter a whole lot. Raids are another matter.
My core has been sk, bard, zerker, (insert priest of choice here). I find boxing melee much easier than casters - just put them all on autofollow and have an /assist tank & attack social. I would only run one hybrid outside of bard unless you don't mind "playing the piano". Sks, pallies, rangers, beastlords are all very spammy, meaning lots of hitting keys to maximize play.
I started with an sk and recently rolled a warrior cause I had never played one, I probably won’t be playing my sk much anymore tbh, I really like my warrior insane dps with just auto attack and defensive abilities that stack with every other defense ability, monk synergy with a warrior seems to be pretty powerful, I wouldn’t swap my monk out of my melee group for anything. I have war, cleric, zerk, beast, monk, bard. I’ll probably swap the cleric out for a sham but it was just hard leveling up from 100 without a cleric.
Have a guildie that runs that setup, and is burning 20m+ in grp content. while boxing this setup in raids his grp is burning over 15m dps.
If I keep the monk, I'm also considering swapping the berserker for a rogue, simply because I've never played a rogue before. Berserkers have a decent amount of melee ADPS, I'm wondering how they compare to rogues overall in a melee group.
This is not my parse nor my group, its a guildies. Combined (4): A huge slime in 35s, 989.05M Damage @28.26M, 1. Zerker = 333.02M@9.79M in 34s 2. Monk = 217.71M@6.22M in 35s
Solid team and no doubt would perform really well for you. I do like the idea of swapping a Rogue for the Zerk. Rogues are stupid easy sustained DPS, have a simple mash and their disc multibind logic works really well so keeping 100% disc uptime is pretty simple. A Rogue won't quite burst like a Zerk, but pound for pound would probably provide more sustained over time. Rogues do require some extra mob positioning work for your tank though to make sure BSs are going off. Not a big deal but something to consider. I would personally have a Mage in there because 1) I main a Mage so I'm biased, but more importantly 2) group CotH is so friggin handy for getting a box team around zones, especially with a Bard in the group.
From behind no discs just autoattack/autoskill its about 0.96 BS per second, from the front about 0.65 BS per second.
My current group of Sk, zerk, brd, shm, mag, mnk does really well. So thats not far off from what you are leaning to.
If you want a group that can move around fast you need wiz, druid, bard, mage, cleric, fellowship, and a LS ring. You can then just port to the nearest location, run the mage with double invs / selos (you have the ring as well so if you need to fade past mobs that see double invs you can run the bard then ring port to the bard for the group coth), group coth the porter, bard, and mage, setup a fellowship, rest of the team ports there. If you need a toon to leave for a while and fellowship timer is down you just suicide them and rez with the cleric back. That isn't a melee group though.
