Freshly returned to EQ after being absent since 2008 and I brought 4 RL friends to group with but we only play one day a week together. When I am on by myself, I want to 3-box my lvl 70 warrior. My lvl 60-70 toons are: Account #1: Warrior / Cleric / Enchanter Account #2: Shaman / Druid / Enchanter / Cleric Account #3: Mage / Wizard / Ranger / Enchanter Originally, I was thinking warrior, mage and either cleric/shaman/druid along with mercs but I wanted to get some opinions. I love having CoTH to help with pulling plus pet. Warrior is wearing a lot of DoN gear and augments. I like grouping with other people when possible but I will not be raiding, just do not have the time. I used to 3-box a mage/druid/cleric when I was by myself (before mercs). My warrior was for grouping/raiding (long ago) but I really would like to play my warrior now in this 3 box since he was my first toon ever played. Any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated.
Warriors make a pretty solid core to box around because they're the easiest tanks to box. You also have a pretty good stable of characters to choose from and have quite a bit of flexibility. There are two big considerations when it comes to boxing setup: 1. How good your setup is / how much effort you want to exert. 2. Whether you want to focus on melee or caster DPS. #1 drives whether you want to rely on merc healers vs player healers. If you work hard enough and improve your setup to where player healing is an option, your shaman, druid or cleric will easily out-heal a merc. If you don't want that responsibility, an enchanter is a good choice for account2. #2 drives what kind of DPS and ADPS you build up. Melee focused is good because your warrior can do quite a bit of damage with some decent ADPS. caster focused is good because it's generally easier. Here's the top groups you can make: war + enc + wiz: Wizard is top shelf DPS atm, and work very well with merc casters to fuliminate their alliance. Enchanter will assist them nicely with mana/adps, along with augmenting your warrior with ADPS and defensive abilities. war + dru + wiz: Swapping out the enc for dru still maintains some ADPS for your wizard, and gives you ports, tracking and healing. Druids are very powerful right now and can do quite a bit of damage. war + dru/enc + wiz: replacing wizard with mage will reduce your DPS by quite a bit, but will give some additional utility in the form of a backup tank and ability to call of the hero. war + sha + rng: This is the best melee group you can make, but the ranger will be hamstrung by mana issues without a good mana source (bard/bst/enc). I'd recommend war+enc+wiz unless you want to be responsible for healing, in which case go war+dru+wiz. My setup uses a warrior as its tank, you can possibly get some ideas on boxing setup from it. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/tucos-setup-critique-welcome.240258/
Tucoh, Thank you very much for all the advice. I will have to study up on the wizard "fulminate their alliance", not really sure what that is. Old_Pepper
I don't get it. Why do people like Druids so much? Shaman is king for HoT and slows Cleric has a wide array of heals, but needs more attention Druid, I've never played, but the least capable healer class, average buffer, and can port / track I'd suggest War / Shm / Mag or Rng Enchanter will work as well instead of Shm, but you won't have the backup heals. Ranger I'd highly suggest, due to track, and easily just autofire in the background. But if you want a mage for coth, the question is which is more important to you: track or coth I've enjoyed track with my bard, but very seldom do I play him. And I've never had a porter. They're helpful but far from mandatory.
http://www.raidloot.com/Spells.aspx?name=frostbound alliance Basically the wizard casts this on a mob, then after a couple caster mercs cast 8 spells on it, it gets hit with 2,445,823 damage. A tank + enc + wiz is basically the ideal trio to do this with.
Full disclosure, I play a melee group and don't rely on the frostbound alliance strat nor use caster DPS mercs. I spent a few minutes testing it out with two mercs and parsed the result with GamParse. If you're not used to GamParse, on the right side is a timeline of the fight. At time=3seconds my wizard(Tucoz) casts Frostbound Alliance. My two caster DPS mercs are Barky and Sparky. Barky is on burn, Sparky is on balanced. They pepper the mob with ~50k and 33k DPS. Once they collectively hit the mob with 8 DD spells by t=19seconds the mob gets popped with this: [Fri Dec 08 19:00:48 2017] Tucoz hit a grove guardian for 2568114 points of non-melee damage. The big caveats with this setup is 1: you're relying on DPS caster mercs doing their job to fulminate the spell and if they do their jobs correctly there will only be a few seconds of buffer time before the debuff drops, 2: you can only cast frostbound alliance every 60seconds. 3. Everyone's DPS will increase as more expansions get released, but the frostbound alliance damage probably won't be upgraded (it wasn't for the latest expansion). So in a couple years the alliance system might not even be a big deal. 4. If you're ever in a situation where you need two healer mercs instead of one (And thus can only have one caster DPS) you won't be able to fulminate the alliance. You can also boost your alliance fulmination by running war + wiz + wiz, but I feel like that's putting all your eggs in one basket.
I wanted to thank Tucoh and Ryanxp for your comments. I played around with all the combos and have mostly been doing War/Shaman/Wiz. One day, a friend of mine joined me with his druid and we had a blast. Got rid of the healer merc and we use one rogue merc and one wizard merc. When I want to play something else, I have been doing Mage/Druid/Enchanter. So much fun being back to EQ!
