Hey guys....coming back and looking for a 3 box team that can mow down groups of 7-8 mobs at a time. Is SK still the best for that? What 3 toons would combine survivability and aoe dps to best effect to do this?
At max level all the plate tanks can survive against groups of 7-8 mobs if they have a typical amount of healing, though they might need to pop a few cooldowns and then rest afterward. The best is, like you say, an SK because their self-healing scales with the number of mobs they're fighting, though that has been nerfed over the years. I've never tried to create a true AE group that uses AE abilities to DPS mobs down evenly, but I'd wager that wizards, mages and necros (with their orb) are the best at it. There are a few reasons that AE groups aren't that popular, one of which is that hard to manage more than 8 or so mobs because of summons and adds in EQ, and single target DPS is so high that pulling a group and cutting them down is pretty fast anyway. Tank survivability is largely cooldown dependent, so you may only be able to survive against a group of 8 mobs for 30 seconds or something before your mitigation drops dramatically and if you haven't killed 4 of them by then you're toasted. Chain stunning mobs is a bit unwieldy simply because tank mitigation is so much higher than anybody else, and it's precarious to keep a group of mobs stunned that you can't tank. Here's a video I made a couple years ago showing me pulling a couple groups of mobs when EoK was current and roasting them. The game hasn't really changed much since then and a single-target melee DPS box group basically looks like this
