I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, but I feel like if you want to practice being a cleric you'll have to find a group to play with, or raid. Playing a cleric as a paladin and tanking will get you used to getting hit and healing yourself while using different abilities you have, but it won't train you to heal in a real group or raid. As you know, healing extends beyond knowing the mechanics and abilities and a good healer is one who understands the players and encounters and anticipates damage (and in raids, gaps in other healers' healing) before it happens. Additionally, if you want to complete your cleric you're going to be spending a lot of time farming augs, completing pre-EoK progression etc. So if you're going to have a boxed team to do that with instead of crawling through it moloing, or leaning on other players to do stuff they probably don't want to do, you should probably set up a boxed team that can breeze through content. If cleric is your main and you're using it to group/raid, you'll be spending plenty of time on it and don't need the extra time in an awkward boxed setup.
OK then, rephrasing the question: To complete as much in group game as possible like aug collecting,which other 2 classes work best with a cleric in a 3 box setup?
Cleric, bard, mage is strong. I will assume that you will use tank merc for multi-mob situations, which is the achilles heel of the mage. Personal preference would be to have an enchanter in the mix. I have been boxing mage/bard/enchanter, with IS boxer, I added the enchanter in order to be able to handle multi-mob situations in EoK. There is a room with 5ish yellow driders that stopped me in progression, until I got my enchanter up. I think that room can be taken by a real tank or an enchanter, only, but perhaps the tank merc with a mained cleric is enough.
You'll want to choose a tank + either utility or DPS. Tank: SK is the best group tank because they can heal themselves via leech, but requires more effort to box. Warrior can tank with much less effort in combat, but requires more healing support, which you have a lot of. Recommendation: Warrior. Utility/DPS: Bards can provide track, selos, mana regen, ADPS and can help with healing (Rytan's) and mitigation (Dobens, Fjilnauk's Spiteful Lyric). They can also pull very well. Rangers can provide track, some ADPS (ranger buffs, auspice) and are good DPS. They are also easy to box because they are ranged and can /autofire Druids can provide track and DPS. Their healing is probably undesirable for you. I also would warn against counting on them to continue to have good DPS in the future. Mages can do OK DPS and their pet can tank while yours is getting geared/AA'd. They can also Call of the Hero which is very useful. Berserker's can provide massive DPS. 2x as much as a rangers, 3x as much as mages. But can't offer much else and require a lot of supervision to box. I also think they won't keep their massive DPS advantage through the next expansion so I wouldn't count on them. Recommendation: Bard. The warrior can bring enough DPS to the table with a 3 person team that you don't need to add a DPS class to do well. Their ability to track makes named hunting, questing and gearing much easier. Their ability to pull/CC makes difficult content much easier, or allows you to skip content by pulling named through multiple groups of mobs. Most importantly: they are easy to box and improve your other classes the most, making it more fun to play a cleric with unlimited mana or a warrior with a bunch of buffs but also improving overall performance in a 3box scenario where the player can do more with fewer actions.
Not to pick a fight, but a war/cle/bard team can just pull the entire room of 5 spiders and kill them with little effort. The warrior can hit flash of anger (parry everything for 6 seconds), pop a few defensive cooldowns, get aggro, position them such that they are in front of the warrior and switch to the cleric before flash of anger is done and start healing. You won't run out of mana on the cleric and will be able to kill the spiders faster from the warrior's autoattack + riposte than a mage can. When I did that progression step I was in TBM group gear with one healer merc. I messed it all up and ended up pulling 8 spiders. I carried someone through that quest a week ago in EoK group gear and just roflstomped everything in 2H mode.
Problem with tank is that I'd need to aug/gear it instead of cleric . I do have a paladin. At 105 in group gear are they really much better than mage?
Yes, by very very far. A mage pet will tank any group single group mob with no problem, assuming AA etc, but will not generate AE aggro. if you are maining the mage, you can chain swarm pets on trash mob nr. two, so with active play you can keep two trash mobs aggroed. A tank class will tank 4-10 mobs in group gear, as well as generate good aggro on all mobs. There is no guarantee it will stay this way, since it trivialize CC, pulling, and off-tanking, which includes roles from what, half the remaining classes in EQ? *Counts on fingers*...evem more... The charm of being a mage is to make it work without a tank in todays groups. With a tank in group, we are just a third rate dps class with CoH and mod rods. CoH is really good, though.
Yes, you'll have to gear it for it to be useful. But it's not as bad as it sounds because: 1. You can get an EoK ready warrior with a couple thousand AAs (beyond auto granted ones) and TBM vendor gear, which you can get fairly quickly when you're boxing. You get hundreds of Remnants of Tranquility per mission per character, and they are tradeable, so you can funnel them to your warrior. 2. While augs are important, people generally place more importance on them than is really warranted, especially for a non-raiding alt. Once you get a base set of the low-hanging fruit from EoK, TBM, CotF, you've got a pretty good setup and getting the tougher ones don't add as much value. The most important one for the warrior is Nathsar's Darkness which you can get from a relatively easy mission (Chardok: Atrebe's Vault). Note that I'm not saying you should put the Artisan's Aug and Tears of Alaris on the todo list for your main, just that once you get a base set of decent augs, getting the tougher augs is going to have small improvement. People talk about augs a lot because it's the #1 way you can improve your character outside of raids. 3. If you start raiding with your cleric, you'll be getting gear on the cleric and won't feel the pain from gearing up your tank. Additionally you won't have much issues with survivability on your cleric (because your warrior should aggro everything easily) or mana (if you have a bard), so gearing up the cleric won't even help you in your box team. I was actually really surprised at how little gear I needed on my cleric before I had no mana issues. 4. Your cleric can provide a lot of healing throughput and mitigation from your double aura + shining bulwark + ward of surety. Your bard helps with that too from dobens/spiteful/rytan. This means you'll be able to heal your undergeard tank through situations that healer mercs wouldn't. It might be painful to see your first set of EoK visibles go to your warrior while your cleric is still in TBM gear, and you might be wondering if you're doing things right camping The Bridgekeeper for the warrior's shield and the watchman nearby for a 2H for the warrior, but in the end your warrior is going to carry you to boxed greatness.
Yeah, sorry. I started off my list with warrior because I don't know how many AAs you need on a paladin before you're in good shape mitigation/aggro wise, and kept with the theme.
I doubt any tank is going to need thousands spent before hitting EOK. Autogrant + TBM gear from remnants + and some basic class knowledge and you'll be fine at 105, especially with a boxed cleric. A full aug set wouldn't hurt.
I guess I should ask: Multi-pc boxing or single pc and tabbing back and fourth between accounts? Are you focusing on maining the cleric,potentially raiding, and the other box toons are just tools to help your cleric, or are you spending time on all the toons as a team?
One computer. Everything is done for the cleric in the long run, it's the only class I enjoy, others are only tools for questing and such . I will be raiding as cleric for sure
Pull out two tank mercs and a wiz and your all set...keep a tank up with the Shaman to help shield dot agro.
