6 Box Melee Dream Team - 2024 Edition

As a gang of six should have a porting class, you should replace one magician with a wizard. Instead of planing to use different melee DPS classes, you should just pick the best one for your playstyle. Standing behind the mob is important for every melee class, that does not tank, but especially for the rogue to deal more BS dmg. Even for ranged attacks I think. I am not a fan of melee classes when boxing because of the positioning, so that is something that you should consider.

You are also missing a necro, which does deal much better DPS against high HP mobs, than a MAG. An enchanter would grant you superior CC and slightly better mana regen and you could choose between different auras including an experience bonus aura. It would also fit better to my recommended caster group setup.

1. shd
2. brd enc
3. mag
4. sha
5. mag wiz
6. mag nec

So here's what I promise you. Get them top tier LS weapons. And go the following:

SK, Shm, Brd, Bst, Rog, Monk. I'd still use poisons personally caught it's easy. And I promise you you'll do more than double your current caster group. It won't even be close once you have the dps aa.

Personally I'd swap the BST for a BER but this is solid.

Done that before. Bst adds massive ADPS to the rest of team and has solid dps. It’s not more dps dropping the bst.

Even when having already a shaman in the group for ADPS ?

Yep. between aa and legacy discs. They are quite nice. Ive not found a melee group setup thta isn’t better giving up one melee for a bst.

Your initial layout is pretty much the perfect 6 man. You don't want multiple of the same class (Lack of ADPS) for the same reason you don't want multiple tanks.

You want separate Monk + Beast because of the monk synergy (Base damage) paired with Bst's bonus damage and flurry rate. Bard obviously boosts everything, Shaman epic is key during burns. Zerker adds +20% crit dmg via crippling blows.

This type of crew can delete anything and run indefinitely through swift tails(monk) and paragon for endurance/mana regen

Thanks for the information!

There seems to be some contention between which two of mnk/ber/rog are best in this type of group! My guess is that means both would be great. I've always wanted a monk, so I'll go with one. I think I like the concept of a berserker more than a rogue, but I've leveled some 4 berserkers already and never a rogue, tough choice!!

On the topic of crippling blows, I know Fury's Synergy describes the bonus, "A crippling blow increases the damage of your critical hit by 19% and has a chance to stun your target.", but is that 19% or 20% modifier applied in the same manner as say, shaman epic (SPA496)

Prophet's Gift of the Ruchu
10: Increase Critical Hit Damage by 110% of Base Damage (Non Stacking)

in that it increases the critical hit damage by 20% of Base Damage, or does it apply after that critical hit damage has been calculated?
In other words, if I swing for 1000 base damage and my crit makes it 4000, does a crippling blow make it 4200 or 4800?

shd
brd
ber
bst
mnk
rog/rng (id prob go rog because rng needs mana and has dot dps)

use power glyphs as a ghetto sham epic for burns on the classes that need it, sham healing isnt really needed for grp content with a sk and nothing survives long enough for shm dots to really do anything

ive wanted to try dropping my sham to do this for awhile but kill xp and lvling is too slow and boring these days.

If the goal is efficiency and or fun then Ranger does not belong in this discussion for boxing.

Get rid of the SK, replace it with a Rogue, make the BL/Monk tank everything.

#Winning!

Your initial team looks sweet, maybe rep the ber with a rog since you seem keen finding out what they can do. The rogue will outshine the ber's adps advantage when fighting blue humanoids and pretty sure their sustained is probably a bit better than ber to begin with. A ber or two might be necessary to delete haf before the minis go active but rog sk mnk and bst burst might be able to push it too.

Tbf, I haven't played my zerks in awhile cause...mages. wasn't ever able to get tons out of my beast in group content for his personal dps outside burns but he did alright and hit dicho none the less. Couldn't imagine a melee group without one, though.

I also only have group gear and rarely max out my AAs on anything but my bard, so I generally never pop glyphs. And I think the most fun I have in EQ is handling bad pulls or intentionally pushing the limits of what's possible.

I've tried to come up with a healer free or tank-free group but the shaman and plate tanks are just so strong. The shaman's DPS/ADPS is lower than another pure DPS class, but moving them out is just asking DPG to put out another mission like The Crusaders!

There's probably some interesting challenge to be had in pushing limits of 6-boxing older raids. Not sure if you've investigated that (I haven't done any so I don't know). The group game is pretty stale these days.

Speaking of which, it'll probably be worth finding a boxable old raid to get raid cleave arms and fero legs for your melee DPS.

"Old raid" armor is comparable or better starting CoV. ToV and before raid armor is worse in stats than LS group gear. And as such - if one is willing to sacrifice HME and stats for raid focus for arms and legs armor (which is a reasonable choice for the most classes/roles) then lvl 100 raid Corrupted Temple of Veeshan is quite easy for a group. In fact some classes can solo it and most can duo all the dragons except the last one, which has waves of adds (still, some good characters can solo even that)

Every dragon in there drops some armor patterns as well as minor to greater spells. Many classes can benefit from Rk3 versions such as Cry Carnage Rk.3 and Ruaabri's Fury Rk.3 , Aria of Absolution Rk.3 etc.

I've pushed some of the older raids. It gets to be annoying pretty fast where the limitations are your ability to perform multiple mickey mouse mechanics simultaneously. In some cases not being able to beat a certain raid blocks the entire expansion. It's something I've considered doing more methodically, but it's just not fun enough to warrant it.

A good example is when I boxed Wailing Sisters back in 2017. It was pretty old then and mechanically the same difficulty as it is now because all the mobs are trivial but the mechanics were tedious. I barely remember doing it but I did write a good writeup ( https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=3265#m1511801012157815900 ) after beating it, just reading the writeup I made is enough to dissuade me from going back to do old events.

This is one thing that has always been anonying for raids. When you have a 3 teir raid set and teir 1 has an event that requires killing 6 mobs within 15secs of each other it becomes really annoying and blocks all the other 20 raids of the expansion because of that one raid being a absolute nightmare to solo.

Some of these are like backburrow where you need to kill groups of mobs at the same time. Flippy raid because gear is pretty much worthless and if you try to solo it you have a 100% chance of failure due to the proc happening so slow you require more people. You have a few others where you get clues to kill certain npc and you have to kill more than one of them within like 15secs of each other or it resets and with a 125 today you will riposte kill the wrong mob by mistakes making it a nightmare to solo / box. Also most of these raids are in early teirs which means the joke easy I can afk and kill 5 T3 bosses can't be requested because you can't kill the T1 bosses.

They should design all raids so after 3 years any type of system that prevents someone from soloing it is disabled.

ugh, do
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=6116
Simple tank-and-spank lvl 100 raid dragons. Each has funny and unique ability to entertain your group.
I can duo it with my mage+beastlord (mercs are not allowed in raid expeditions).
with mag+mag+bst it's a breeze.
Go whack the dragons and score "true dragon" kills for the bane achievement.

yeah I did CToV, was fun.

I have 3 ber, 3 rog, 2 bard 2 sham, 2 war

I typically box
War bard sham rog ber ber. When 6 boxing. And never have issues with a single thing.