Best 3Box for EoK?

Done leveling new characters and just want to improve current toons with EoK gear. RoS way too hard in TBM group 1 gear. What would make the best team? Very casual player, but EoK seems fun.

Acct One: Pal106, Bard106,Monk106
Acct Two: Ranger 106, Shaman 105, Rogue 107
Acct Three: Mage 105.99 (adding def AA for pet)

Gear for each incl EoK BP and one or two additional pieces such as helms.

My opinion is that your best combination is Pal/Sha/Mag. You'll get tanking, utility and good damage. The mage and shaman are relatively easy to box in a basic way. You won't have track, the paladin right now has fallen behind other tanks and you have some risk of them heavily nerfing shaman/druid DoTs.

Once your paladin is decently geared he'll easily outclass the mage pet in tanking. You can use him to pull groups of mobs and CC them with the shaman's AE knockback/root spell and then pull and kill each mob down. Or just tank them all simultaneously. DoT the out of one with your shaman and let it cook while you kill all its friends.

Keep Shaman alliance up on the paladin and have one or more healer mercs, when their spells land on him it'll AE heal everybody (including the paladin too).

Once you're comfortable with paladin tanking, use the water pet for the mage and an easy social macro to cast some basic servant->chaotic->spear->spear combination. (more info here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/wiz-mage-dps-web-app.243782/page-6 )

Get good at moving your mage around solo and CotHing your characters. You can IVU the mage, and then have shaman cast invis on it to get invis to living/dead, but watch out for spiders and chokidai! This is really effective in dungeons because you can bypass a lot of content.

Agree w Tucoh on team composition but curious why water over air in group/box set up.

Me too - is it just for backstab? I always use Air for the stun.

Purely for damage considerations. As you're gearing up your paladin, earth/air could make more sense.

Right on. I haven’t parsed them but I prefer the stun and aggro generation the air provides. Op: I’d just dink around w different pets to see which works best for your game. Gl.

Mage, ranger or sham, bard is really an amazing trio for EOK. However ROS you aren't going to be able to go through ROS progression from what I have heard.
Other option would be Pali, sham and mage as Tucoh stated. DPS mercs will help but with this group your dps isn't going to be stellar.

Avoiding a second melee is a good option. Boxing multiple melee is never as easy as multiple casters.

Why will they not be able to go through ROS progression?

crowd control is seriously needed, especially in group gear.
Also there is the fact that the last patch made the OT mission HARDER than most t2 missions.