/pet swarm is for sending rage pets (e.g., Rioutous/Roiling Servant) to another mob. Host of Elements swarm pets and clickie pets are also sent. About as important as your /pet kill command (i.e., super important), especially when you are killing mobs fast, especially with shaman aura providing haste, upping pet dmg. Make sure you have your AA and Type 3 aug reducing servant recast. You can have 3-4 going at once, and they can be reassigned to new mobs with /pet swarm. Imagine if necros/shaman/druid could transfer dots to new mobs when theirs die. That's /pet swarm. With applicable AA, focus, etc., orb fires between casts for about 250k (crit) to 1m+ (during burn, with twincast, and casting procs). Inconvenient to recast them, especially for a box, but you can make it tolerable with a macro to cast and /autoinventory, and then either incorp the orb activation in a macro, or add it to a separate key or multibind that you simply click whenever you swap to the mage. Leave orb out and you are leaving millions of essentially free dmg off the table. (Just make sure you don't activate it right after Servant cast, as you'd rather give the synergy to a higher dmg spear/volley). Search up mage guides/discussion on Composite Companion. It's left out of most mage lineups for good reasons (especially if you are running some of the stuff that the pet buff won't stack with and if you have mana problems or want mage pet aggro). It's not awful, but i suspect it's holding back your mage DPS in several ways. I didn't mention it before, but consider moving your first pet attack macro into something near-instant that doesn't include cast spells. Vumad's is a good example. That should let you hit two macros when you toggle to mage. Right now your first macro has 97 pause and you have to wait for global cooldown from a spell cast before you can activate the second macro. Either you are doing all you need to do on the SK and Sham and toggling back to the mage super fast to activate Macro 2, or you are waiting for Macro 1 to execute to activate Macro 2. You are probably introducing inefficiency in either circumstance. Plus, a short /pet kill & /pet swarm macro lets you adjust to changing battle conditions quickly (maybe you have another macro for that since the one you listed is just for Xtar 1?).
I'd also consider a wiz for a few reasons..... 1. SK and Shaman are both pretty "busy" classes, wiz is the least time spent and input for the most DPS. 2. You could macro the wiz and literally hit one button per fight. 3. Wiz don't have to engage right away to be effective DPS, they need to wait for agro buildup anyhow so they don't draw agro, it makes for a great box toon for that reason alone, the timing is great with a wiz. Having a class that isn't losing DPS because they didn't do anything the first 30% of a fight is great for boxing. 4. Port to bind is pretty awesome, as are evacs and succors for shenanigans. I played SK/SHA/Wiz as one of my main 3 boxes for years, it's a great combo, and one of my favorites.
Yes, inner space boxer will pick that up. There's a way to get around that by enabling / disabling hotkeys. I also get a bit clever with using a Logitech G600 mouse that I can use the thumb buttons to send a bunch of uncommon keys (like home or NumPad9) to IS Boxer, which interprets them to send Q, 1, etc to the right boxes. There are a lot of options to use, the important thing is to keep your boxes casting and attacking.
I'm brand new and very bad with my newly 120 DPS alts, but one thing I noticed quickly is if you do bind the orb to a multibind it must go last or it blocks other things while on recast or not in inventory. Also I turn off recast warning messages to avoid spamming them to the log/chat I'm sure the setup horribly wastes procs and Twincast so when/if I learn to manage them better alternate hotkey pages can remove it and the AA nuke from multibind. I figure, perhaps falsely, that putting the AA nuke and orb at the bottom of the multibind list to cast between spells is better than not using them at all. Then I check the orb charges and hit a hotkey to summon and /autoinv it between mobs if I remember.
RS pets are swarm pets. You can have up like 4 at a time. If the mob dies, they will return to you like a regular pet. They will not get back into the fight without a swarm command.
Nothing worse than seeing a bunch of big fat mage pets standing around doing nothing. My grandma weeps at the lost dps.
It sounds to me like you need to learn to play each class better. Have you tried just soloing with your mage until you know what you're doing?
No, because I don't have the time to play a mage solo. One of the reasons I decided to 3 box is so that I can accomplish more with the understanding that I'm never going to be at 100% utilization compared to someone playing that class explicitly.
You have to walk before you can run. If you're getting less than 100k DPS from a level 120 mage with all the needed AAs your current utilization is extremely low. I doubt it's over 10%. Learn to play one class and then add a second. Do you have some kind of deadline where you have to accomplish whatever you're after like next month or something?
So EQ is a hobby for me, not a full time job. Who has time to solo every class to max level and learn the ins and outs of every single class and then say, "I think I'm going to start boxing?" That just doesn't make any sense to me. Like many other players, I have a family, full time job, and other commitments. Yes, I want to learn how to play my classes well, but I also know that playing multiple characters at the same time, regardless of whether I'm using inner space or just alt-tabbing, is going to be less efficient than characters played 100% solo by a real person. That's just the nature of boxing. If I were to read everything there is to read about every class from these forums, class forums, Reddit, etc. then I would get stuck spending so much time theory-crafting that I wouldn't ever be playing the game. Additionally, even I was a master at playing the Mage as a main to maximize DPS, it doesn't mean I could do that by BOXING a mage. I'm still going to suffer from DPS loss by boxing a character instead of maining it. To specifically answer your question about my "deadline," I am tired of being behind the power curve, and as I mentioned in my original post, I am now working on my tradeskill earring, which people have said will take me months to complete, tons of evolving/killing, and some people have said (their words, not mine) that, "suicide is better than doing the tradeskill earring," which I find rather depressing and ludicrous, but if it's really that difficult, I'd much rather do it with a class that lets me kill faster and more efficiently; hence, my original post about which class is best suited for my boxing situation. What if find odd is that I was looking for which class might be a better fit to me (and I did get some good responses on this), but many people came to the defense of the mage and what I'm doing wrong with it, but on these forums, you can't win. Some folks will say that the mage pet is 25% of it's damage, and you can "easily" box a mage with 2 macros. At the same time, I've been told that my utilization is less than 10% of what a mage is capable of, and I should really learn to main a mage before I learn to box one. Those are completely contradictory thoughts. I'll try tweaking the spell lineup for the mage, and I'll probably adjust my incoming key to use pet swarm command and dropping composite companion based on some of the feedback in this thread, but ultimately, I think I'm still going to stick with the bard. It's going to help me farm missions (like Shei) and progression with things like double invis, AE mez, and other utility, plus it's far easier to box the bard than micro-manage the mage.
I've thought about trying to solo on each of my solo-capable boxes and decided it wasn't worth my time. I'm sure spending a dozen hours soloing on my mage, beastlord, shaman etc would help my boxing skills, but not as much as a dozen hours of boxing with a focus on self improvement.
I never suggested you learn every class but it helps greatly to learn the classes you're actually playing. Once you learn how to play a Mage you'll have a much easier time figuring out how to incorporate it into a box group. I'll save you some time. Ignore that earring. It's not much of a power increase. You're getting awfully defensive over a simple suggestion. And what you seem to be missing is that the pet classes are extremely strong. Learn to play a Mage well with a merc and you'll accomplish more than you are now trying to 3 box classes poorly. A good SK can even get a lot done on their own. They typically can molo missions and do almost everything. However, they're much more gear dependent which is why I'd recommend centering things around a pet class in your situation. The problem isn't your choice of classes. an SK/shaman/mage group should be able to do pretty much anything and be absolutely amazing at that. You just need to focus on learning to play the classes better.
It will be much faster for you to properly learn to play a class that you already have than to level a new one in hopes of more dps. If you dont learn the new class you will be in the same situation as with your mag. The mag is a strong "box" if done right
Well, you don't know what he currently has in that slot, so you don't know if it's much of an upgrade for him or not.
It doesn't matter what he currently has in the slot. If all his other gear was good he could leave it empty. Or alternatively he could fill it with the easiest reasonable earring he can get. There's not a single thing that he'll be prevented from doing with that group if he doesn't have that earring. Gear just isn't that important and all three classes are arguably the strongest options he could have picked.
If we are talking about the Rallos earring for the mage, it is honestly nothing more than just hit points and mana. There is no focus that it brings to a mage that makes it relevant. One could argue its relevance if you have the melee/spell proc augs, but you can get that from other gear such as gloves, boots, etc. For the amount of time one has to sink into the Rallos earring to make it relevant in today's game from a stat perspective, it is significantly higher than just camping a TOL named for a similar stat earring. It is a time investment that honestly is not worth it in 2022/2023 unless you really want to do the quest and all the work associated with. Which is a LOT
