MY main will be a warrior,was thinking of cleric druid mage enchanter and a bard,since i work rotating shifts my raid time and grouping time his limited,any suggestions on the class make up?
Bard + ench is a bit overkill I'd probably do something like war, cleric, druid, mage enchanter, wiz - and the druid could be switched in or out for wiz also. I run sk, ench, mage, mage, wiz at the moment. But I've got about 8 variations including a bard, shaman, necro.
Warrior is a melee class, so in theory you could go for a heavy melee DPS group. But melee DPS are more work to box than caster DPS, because of positionning for example. I suggest warrior, cleric, enchanter, magician, wizard and ranger. All is covered : Best healer for all situations CC (best one at it) so pulling covered, + caster DPS support Coth / can OT add mob with pet if needed Evac / port Track / work not bad in a caster group / can DPS well while being in range And overall double invis at same time is covered too (IVU + regular Invis)
I have both Enchanter and Bard, and it works really well for me, in a fast pulling , caster heavy group, I am not sure why you want the cleric, the druid would cover the healing fine. Also, I would add more dps, so swapping the cleric for a caster dps will keep setup simple for you. Be sure to check out IS Boxer, and Tucos masterclass post on boxing.
There's a few important and non-intuitive considerations when selecting a box team: 1. Is your goal to assist get a box crew to assist a raiding main with camping augs, finishing old progression etc? If so you're probably better off three-boxing, because you'll get to there faster than six boxing. Setting up a good six-box takes a lot of time and effort, and the benefit is primarily being able to do harder group content without any assistance. If you're a raider, it's easier to just do that harder content with some raiding buddies who also need it. 2. Once you get any decent boxing setup (3 or 6), adding and replacing new characters is easy due to being able to funnel fellowship XP to them, and being able to gear them up with rotting drops. It'll still take time, but you don't have to feel like your initial team is permanent. I'd say most people who focus on boxing are like me and Vaeeldar in that we swap out different characters for fun or different situations. Personally I roll with two healers when I start an expansion and swap out a cleric for a DPS midway through just because it's more fun and harder. The only thing that's tough to change is melee DPS vs caster DPS. 3. How much effort are you willing to spend improving your team? It's a long journey to get a really good setup, and every new kind of tough group mission or raid may require tweaking. 4. Most of EQ isn't really balanced for a well-thought out 6 box team, so any OK 6box group with a tank + healer + whatever is going to dominate most of EQ. The only thing that gets tough is the missions. With that out of the way, here's the key aspects I'd say for a 6 box team: A: Kill speed: A good team can sustain 500k DPS and can burn at 1 million DPS over a minute or so. This is fairly easy to get the capacity for with a selection of good DPS + good ADPS, but can be a little hard to actually achieve in practice until you get your setup working correctly. B: Tankability: A good box team can tank 6+ mobs simultaneously with burns, and regularly be able to grind down 3 mobs without burning. In the current state of the game, this is only possible with a real tank, and much easier with a war/sk. Because of the alliance spell, this is much easier with two healers. C: Sustainment: A good box team can chain pull and not stop for mana breaks regularly. My beastlord is a key part of being able to sustain indefinitely. Without him my warrior runs out of endurance. Mages can sustain indefinitely, I have idea about wizards. Rangers can sustain as long as a virgin on prom night. D: Tracking: This is great for both questing and opportunistic killing of named. I go to great lengths to never poach named, but there's a lot of gear I've gotten purely because named mobs spawned that I wasn't camping that nobody wanted. E: Maneuverability: Bards and mages are top-tier at being able to move groups around (bards because of selos/double invis and mages because of call of the hero). Rogues can help by dragging corpses with their stealth abilities. Druid/Wizard ports are overrated IMO, there are so many ways to port around the world with guild hall + PoK that it's really the last mile that's important. F: Being able to handle diverse encounters: Every new kind of encounter whether it's the last progression quests in RoS, the End of Empire mission in RoS, the Droga mission in EoK or the Anashti Sul missions in TBM bring new challenges and may require adjustments to your setup. If you go to heavy with caster DPS you might find a spellshield or silence mob that is really tough. If you go too heavy with melee DPS you'll find certain damage shield mobs really tough in RoS. Sometimes a group that doesn't have a perfect synergistic setup can do better overall by being able to perform good in most situations, and just OK in goofy situations, vs being great in most situations and terrible in goofy ones. G: Resistance to nerfs / stagnation: This is specific to stacking one class, and really isn't a big deal. But if you stack mages / berserkers (which is really, really good right now and will probably be good into the future), you put yourself at risk at being meh one day when the fairly poor balancing hits your team with a nerf bat. All that being said, here's a few good groups: war / cle / dru / enc / mage / wiz: heavier tankability, but still decent damage. war / dru / enc / mage / mage / mage: Stack mages, see pistols4panda's posts war / dru / enc / mage / wiz / wiz: relies on wizard DPS, maintains mages for pet/coth Druid/Enchanter offer healing + tankability + critical spell ADPS. Mages / Wizards are the top caster DPS right now. Necros are good, but in high DPS groups their DoTs just aren't fast enough. With a good team you'll be killing a mob in 10-15 seconds, so you'll get like, 2 ticks of 1 DoT and 1 of your second DoT. If your warrior isn't geared, I'd recommend you do the first one, with the intention of replacing the cleric with a DPS class later. Clerics have so few AAs that matter, and because they are mana efficient their gear isn't a big deal. They'll hit their cap (in terms of character power) much faster than every other class. Having an account that you can swap between a DPS class and a cleric is really useful. Having two healers is going to allow you to jump to RoS much more quickly, and you'll also have the opportunity to learn how to DPS with your druid. You can also check out my thread here for some idea of what a melee DPS group would look like: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/tucos-setup-critique-welcome.240258/
Druid healing is just fine. Cleric healing is amazing and destroy druid healing output. In the case he is getting multiple mobs that cannot be mezzed on his warrior, the cleric will have way more chance than the druid to keep him alive through tough situations.
It's much easier with a paladin too. In fact, paladin survival is the best of the 3 tanks in group content due to their amazing active cast self healing tools. And paladin aggro is also much better and in line with the other 2 tanks now they received the very big boost in RoS.
I wouldn’t use a WAR. Since you are tho I would think war, shaman, Bard, Ranger, zerker, zerker. Maybe switch out the shamen for cleric, but shaman buffs are very nice. Have fun runing lol. I personally would go SK, Druid, Chanter, Mage, Wizard, wizard. Maybe switch out a wizard for another Mage or even another Enchanter. Haveing that second wizard opens up two diffrrent bind spots you can port the whole group to as well as two secondary bind point etc.
I would fill out the rest of the group with casters as opposed to melee. Less maintenance with mob positioning and lower gear requirements. Favor dd casters over dot casters for dps since group mobs die fast. Forget bard if your going with ench. Just pull with war and face tank everything, drop an ae mez if you pull too many. War/Cleric/Ench/Wiz/Wiz/Mage sounds good. Nice to have at least one mage for coh and one wiz for ports.
Pretty much what Tucoh said above (especially about the 3char core and adding more in over time), with the following - based on my personal preferences since boxing is imo such a subjective thing that there is no "ultimate" answer - adjustments: WAR make great tanks of course, but are even more gear-dependent than SHDs - SHDs need less heals and give you the ability to solo(!) some hard-to-reach-with-the-whole-group stuff (e.g. nameds in prince room when EoK was current). So which tank you "should" use depends on how far you've geared the WAR already. MAGs - i love these for caster DPS, because they're less mana-intensive than wizards and get ROG or stun pet to add to the DPS; the CotH is a welcome bonus too. SHM - as WAR i like to have one around, not JUST for buffs and backup heals, but also for the insta-invis that not MANY classes have (most have a casting time and some even rather long reuses). BST - whenever with a caster of almost any kind (save CLR and ENC that is), i want a BST around, even though he eats up most focused para himself; melee support with SHM. ROG - add good dmg imo and lots of useability for a group (corpse-drag, scouting...) but is "good enough" to have in fellowship most of the time (once he has his SoS2 at least) just to help getting set up properly and reasonably quick. While a tracker is good, i get around without by simply scouting with a ROG - more time intensive, but otherwise ok enough for me. IF i'd go for a tracker, it'd probably be a DRU these days rather than a ranger, as for ME a RNG box is merely arrowing it (with BST i got enough to do managing a melee's spells already, don't want another). Generally, with the way i box, caster-DPS is far easier to manage than melee, but i still prefer melee due to sustainability, even with the reduced overall DPS from missing on disc/burn timings+usage. If i were to set up a 6box team (on two machines, so i can play two chars at the same time with 90+ efficiency), it'd be my WAR main with my primary CLR box, a BST,SHM,MAG and MNK - simply from the accounts and characters i currently have, with the option to replace the CLR by a WIZ, WAR by ENC and MNK by SHD for an alternate, somewhat more caster-based, setup.
Re: the melee vs caster decision, you can see the ease or difficulty on herding a melee group in this vid I made this morning (partially for this thread): It's a surmountable problem, but it gets much harder when you have to move summoning mobs out of AE circles, or you have to separate them because of AE or viral debuffs/dots. What makes melee groups especially fun for a warrior main is that all the ADPS stacks pretty cleanly, so you feel like a demi-god taking on all comers and dishing out massive damage.
With a caster heavy box, a thing to notice is that mana levels of the different toons will drive some tuning. For example, if you are pulling very fast, your enchanter may be going oom first; you then trim, maybe take a spell out of his rotation, after which maybe it is the wizard that races to oom faster than the others, etc etc. These things can drive decisions that are not toon-optimal, but more group-optimal instead. This is part of the charm of boxing. Edit: oooh, boxing goodies from Tucos, great videos . Very nice dps.
Tucoh really said it best. I think the big thing to realize is that once you have a max level box team it's easy to add more or alternate. I literally killed my necro this past week and added a cleric into the mix. Took one week to power level them from to 110 without vitality.... Melee make life hard. Bard selos is addicting so be careful there. My only other reference is it's hard to not go SK in the group game - very nice box tank between great agro, and self healing around Taps and 2.0. So much flexibility.
I think a balanced group goes a long way, stacking anyone class can hurt you after a single patch. Right now I'm rolling Sk, bard, enc, zerk, mage, clr and I'm not struggling at all. Bard and enc may be overkill, but but that's largely because of raid needs, it works just fine in RoS t2, can smash the EoK missions, and makes older progression a breeze with decap.
It definitely won't slow you down I occasionally run ench, bard, sk, mage, mage or wiz for mage. But from personal experience adding in a wiz instead of bard is far more dps. You just don't need both. IT's been hard for me though cause I hate not having perm selos lol.
Are you gonna box all 6 yourself? I tried that and it was painful but I didn't use any box software because the rules are fishy. To me there are dream teams but having to do it all yourself means picking stuff that is easier to play while spamming alt tab. So I would never use a melee except for tanking.
