Ok so my first TLP was on agnarr. I had to stop playing shorty after hitting 50 on a shaman during classic. My mage is only lvl 18 and im curious about a few things: How much does MotM really affect mages? From what I'm reading, raid bosses get hp/ac/dmg buffs, and cant be tanked by pets, and 100% pet dmg aggro is transferred to the owner. So how much does that throttle a mages nuking power? Does it REALLY suck or is it just inconvenient? I liked having a really strong pet on P1999, but even at my low level Enchanters seem to be able to charm for extended periods of time. Am I better off just rolling an Enchanter to play a pet class? How much are mages desired by raid guilds, and what can I expect to be doing during a raid?
Well as a Mage who went through all of Agnarr except Luclin let me fill you in. Pet damage doesn't scale very well, and the later is goes w/o a focus the worse it gets. Raids: MotM isn't bad because it nerfs your pet's damage... its bad because it transfers threat. And that little guy can pump out some serious threat (especially epic pet) which really hinders your ability to nuke. But classic-velious you won't be doing much nuking since everything except a couple targets have very very high fire/magic res. You also can't heal your pet until Luclin, so if there is any AoE it is dead and it doesn't get group buffs/heals so that doesnt help. You have very long casts too so getting in and out for AoE is pretty hard. Your pets dont scale to 60 until PoP and stay at lvl 48 ish... so they very rarely land procs in kunark, your epic pet proc doesn't even show up on damage meters anyways. No real pet focus for raiding doesn't help with this either. Groups: Welcome to oomville. You have to very very carefully nuke because you have no innate way of regenning mana and it creates a real problem for mages. You have no lower res spells but you do have malosi line. But malosi is expensive... and mobs get pulled very very fast. So you can choose to malo and maybe nuke once, but your pet will be able to proc and damage as well, or you can nuke twice but might do 0 damage with resists. Fire pet rocks but is an aggro machine and has like 1k HP so it will constantly die. You will always be a low priority DPS to pick UNLESS its like Seb Juggs and you can coth reps in. They will always want you there. Solo: Don't beleive the lies you hear, its awful. You CAN chain pets, nuke, whatever and you CAN kill some blues this way but your downtime is massive. But you can farm giants very well at 60. You can make like 2kpp an hour farming giants, which is great for snapping up krono during the low prices between classic and velious
See above for raids and solo. I would say that mages do well in small group settings since the pet regens so fast. I do disagree for groups. Depending on the dungeon (i.e. seb), Mages can be 2nd or 3rd best dps in a group setting. Avoid places like Chardok where too many classes outshine you.
I am in a hurrry to go to work and haven't time to reply to all, but you might want read the TLP section of the mage class board which you will find here : https://eqmagetower.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=68&sid=670622b47655602dcaf02d9c075fba4c Sorry to be so brief
