I'm thinking of adding a healer, probably cleric, to my box crew (Pal/Ench/Wiz/Wiz) to take on harder content that merc healers are limited in. With the 4 box I'm typically on the paladin and broadcasting multi-binds to the rest unless I need to do crowd control or one off abilities. I'm usually on a laptop due to my travel schedule and this works fine with the current setup. My question for those that multi-box a tank & healer, what is your play style? Are you broadcasting to healer, using healer and broadcasting to tank, alt-tabbing & splitting time etc? After reading some of the how-to-play-a-healer threads I would think once combat starts and the tank has engaged, you're on the healer i.e. proactive healing, always be casting etc. but never having played a healer class, I don't have a feel for it at all. Curious to see how others are managing it, thanks.
with that group you superwant dru not cle. Blackwolf soooo powerful for Enc-Wiz-Wiz. They're not as great multibind healers as cle, but they're more than fine. Huge upgrade from mercenaries, obviously. They gain significant power if you're able to arrange a bit of target swapping to debuff & cast Remotes on the mob, too.
I do SHD-WIZ-WIZ-ENC and have started working on CLR. Right now the CLR is on the same account as the ENC, but as soon as they bring back cross-account transfers, I am going to make it a six-box, with a magician on the sixth. My play style is to kill everything ASAP before it kills me. I am practically always burning on the wizards and enchanter. I pretty much have two spam keys: burn, and hard burn, and I am constantly mashing one or the other. The multibinds are the same for the SHD and ENC, but the WIZs have separate burn and hard burn multibinds. I do broadcast keys, and if I keep my modifier key held down during either of these, the cleric also spams a heal, so it's easy to start and stop spamming heals. I also hate splitting, mezzing, slowing... can do, but I'm impatient. When I was using two healer mercs, I liked to pull 2-3 mobs at a time and just burn them all down, talking about T2 ROS group content here. When I replaced the enchanter with the real cleric, I swapped one of the healer mercs for a DPS merc, and now I pull 5-8 at a time. When my six-box dream comes true, it will be a nonstop synergy and burn fest! Maybe I can pull the whole Xalgoz room in Sathir's Tomb and burn most of them down before deflection disc wears off! However... Can you expand on this a bit? What else can a druid offer? First rank of black wolf lasts two minutes and refreshes in eight; does this improve at higher ranks and with spell casting reinforcement? If you tell me I can burn harder, you have my attention, but not if it's for less than half the time and it can't keep me alive against 3+ mobs at once. Edit: Also just asked one of my druid friends, and she said she rarely uses black wolf anymore since it got nerfed. It no longer increases damage... yikes.
@Brohg I thought about a druid, especially if they allowed character/account transfers since I have one on the main wizard account. However, I'm leaning cleric because my content limit is not dps but keeping my paladin alive in encounters such as the 4th wave of End of Empire. That and I'm guessing that narrowing the focus of the 5th box down to healing would be easier to handle. Which is part of the reason for asking about play styles to get a better understanding of what adding the healer box looks like. @Dreadspire I will burn through most of the time as well and/or use ae or beam mez to buy a little time with broadcast hotkeys. Although on crawls or breaking camps with no campfire support I'll go active on the enchanter to lesson the wipe risk. Thanks for the replies.
Okay what Blackwolf will do for you. It is on a 7.5 minute timer up for 4 minutes then 3.5 minute cooldown til reuse. Increases mana regen by 70 per tic while active. It works of direct damage spells, reducing mana cost by 10-15%, increasing chance to crit by 10%, and increasing crit damage by 100%. This is maxed at 110.
Thank you, my dude. Was getting conflicting info from two druids, Lucy, and Raidloot. Glad to know spell casting reinforcement affects the AA and that it does increase the damage. For some reason, I will trust you more than the others
I don't have much experience with druids, but I can also recommend looking at all the things they would do for your wizard and enchanters. As for play style with tank + healer, I use I S Boxer with a cleric and a shaman. Both of them have a similar setup with a button I press on pull, a light burn button, a heavy burn button and a bunch of spam buttons for their spell multi-bind and AAs. I have special buttons for doing group heals, cleanses and the intermittent buffs I have to keep up on them. I detail the above setup here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...p-critique-welcome.240258/page-6#post-3627663
Druids bring a few things: Group Black Wolf - 4min - 100% Crit DMG Mod, 10% Critical Chance, 12.5% Mana Pres, 70 Mana Regen Frostreave Aura - A lesser version of MR Aura from your enchanter. They don't stack however if you cast them at different times they used to pulse at different times and when say... you've eaten 4/6 charges on MR the Druid version will pulse and replace with a full 6- charge buff, and over and over. Basically if you find you're casting fast enough to eat all the proc counters on MR currently and find yourself with downtime where MR is down, running both auras is helpful. Debuffs - Our AA Fire Debuffs are great for just raw fire Resist, ATK, and AC reduction. However for ADPS Debuffs you have to reach into our actual spells. The Skin to Sulmac line of spells amplifies fire damage spells about 7% before critical blast. This Debuff is nice because it is 0.5s cast but it has the downside that it only can target humanoids. If you are setting up a box Druid I'd have them: /Assist Tank or /Assist MA /cast Skin to Sulmac /alt activate Blessing of Ro (AA ATK/AC/FR Debuff) /cast Remote Sunblaze to heal your tank /alt activate Fire Storm (AA Nuke) The Druid Ice Debuffs generally aren't worth casting in the group game IMO. We have an identical cold Damage modifier Debuff that increases DMG to cold Nukes by 7%. But this Debuff is a 2.5s cast time which is meh and I'm not sure how frequently you use cold spells. We also have a Cold ATK buff but that's also not useful against non-named or non-raid targets. The downside of the Druid as a box is you can't simply Multi-bind Remedies or multi-bind Reckless like other priests can for fast 0.5-1.0s heals. Druids have 4-5 single Heal lines, only one of which can be cast back to back and in current content it's fairly slow: Vida - 3.8s base cast time heal. This hastes down to 2.3s with spell haste from a merc and raid beneficial haste focus, 2.6s with spell haste from a merc and group beneficial haste focus or 3.0s with group beneficial haste focus only. Unfortunately this is the heal you will use the most because it's the only Druid heal that doesn't have a long recast timer. Adrenaline - 1.8s base cast time heal with chance to proc Mitigation buff on target. This doesn't haste down at all and has a recast of 15s and shares that recast with previous versions of the spell. Revitalization - 0.5s base cast time heal. This is your emergency Heal and has a recast of 12s and shared recast with previous versions of the spell. Remote ToT Nuke/Heal - 1s base cast time, focuses to 0.8s with AAs. Recast of 24s base focuses down to 16s with AAs 15s with BP focus. We have a Fire and Cold version of this spell but they both share recast timers with each other and past versions of those spells. Dichotomic ToT Nuke/Heal - 4s base cast time, focuses to 2.5s with AAs and group detrimental haste focus. Recast of 60s. We also have the Promised line of delays heals that sort of works. I would suggest having different keys for Emergency heal (Revitalization), Fast Heal (Adrenaline) and basic Heal (Vida). Depending on the speed you need to fire them off at. Another downside for your particular combination is the priest defensive proc buffs (Shining for Clerics, Reptile for Druids and Incapacity for Shamans). Of those three buff lines the Druid line does not stack with Paladin's Preservation self buff line, while the other two do. Also the Druid/Shaman Savage Growth Temporary line doesn't stack with your Defiant Stance line. If you think you need heals every 3 seconds, Druids cannot provide that like clerics and Shamans can with their spam heals. But if you think you only need heals every 5 seconds Druids can do that with their Vida spam (just like the other priests) and they can provide that additional ADPS to your wizards and enchanter. They can fire off a few quick heals but they will take a bit more finess to play effectively as your Healer I would think.
That's great info, including the assist/hot keys. With "backing up the healing dumptruck" on the tank, do you have mana issues at all?
Thanks for the detail and I think that's the essence of it...is the extra adps from the druid, plus debuffs etc, worth the less effective(slower) healing. With a T1.5 group geared paladin, it's those big hits in ROS via zone or mob dd's/dots combined with a tough round of melee hits that knocks him out. This makes me lean toward the faster heals.
Agreed. Thanks for bringing up this discussion. As much as that 100% spell damage increase turns me on, it is probably preferable to stay alive. I appreciate the effort though and the sharing of knowledge and experience here. By the way, to get back to your question, you'll probably find enough information from Tucoh's boxing post. But the consensus on clerics, boxed or mained, is to use a multibind that goes through two or three Remedy spells, followed by some combination of Undying life and one or two Intervention spells. In my playing, I dot that multibind with some of the emergency heal AAs here and there, like Burst of Life and Beacon of Life and Divine Arbitration, buff up with Shining Defense, use the HP and damage absorption auras, and make use of Promised and Yaulp to be mana-efficient, and I've done well so far. There are not that many AAs that are core to this either. Just max the healing ones under archetype, a few in class, and the focus lines for Remedy and Intervention.
No. Both the shaman and cleric are efficient enough that they can maintain their mana well enough even without stellar gear and a lot of AAs.
Stacks with Cleric buffs after level 85. The level 81 Yaulp doesn't stack but later versions had the mana regen shifted from slot 6 to slot 3. The only things it doesn't stack with are Necro Death Bloom AA and Beastlord Pact of Wurine AA.
Thanks, very helpful. I have the cleric up to 89 so will be a bit before he's ready for being the main healer. I'm guessing 105ish before he can take over from merc.
Skin to Sumac Sumac SumacFruit.JPG Sumac fruit in the autumn season Scientific classification e Kingdomlantae Clade:Angiosperms Clade:Eudicots Clade:Rosids Order:Sapindales Family:Anacardiaceae Subfamily:Anacardioideae Genus:Rhus L.[1] Type species Rhus coriaria L.[2] Species About 35 species; see text Sumac (/ˈsjuːmæk/, /ˈʃuːmæk/ or /ˈsuːmæk/; also spelled sumach, sumaq) (Assyrian Neo-Aramaic: ܣܘܼܡܵܩܵܐ, translit. summāqāʾ, lit. 'red, red shift, turning red', Arabic: سُمّاق, translit. summāq) is any one of about 35 species of flowering plants in the genus Rhus and related genera, in the family Anacardiaceae. The dried and powdered fruits of Rhus coriaria are used as a spice in Middle Eastern and South Asian cuisine. Sumacs grow in subtropical and temperate regions throughout the world, especially in East Asia, Africa and North America.
Looks like you already went cleric so jumping in late but I run two main box groups: 1) Paladin, Wiz, Wiz, Ench, Mage, Cleric Merg 2) SK, Shaman, Necro, Mage, Bard, Cleric Merc - New group is Sk, Cleric, Wiz/Mage, Mage, Bard and wiz merc Funny thing even though I've run that for years in the last month I've swtiched it up. I've replaced the shaman with a cleric and the Necro with a wiz. I still sub the shaman occasionally but it's funny the cleric heals so much better that everything has become easier. On my group gear SK i had no problem boxing the 19th anniversary dinner quest with the cleric healing. I know for a fact if I had the shaman it would been a nightmare. I'm typically a fan of dps is king these days but in this case the cleric is raw healign truck that unless your raid geared your almost definitely better of going with a cleric and then using a Wiz merc. The raw healing power makes your life immensely easier.
Similar experience in that when a friend joins with a cleric or shaman, life gets much easier than using the cleric mercs. It also adds to dps due to adding the wiz merc with the live healer replacing the 2 clerics. That's what's driving me to add the healer so good to see your confirmation. The only downside besides leveling one up is going back and doing EOK progression for EOTD...not looking forward to redoing the burnai/centaur faction dance.
For a spec alt druid if in healing mode where I am casting my slow heal and other singles plus group heal as available. debuffs AA nuke and the occasional ToT nuke/heal I never drop below 90% mana short of a mana drain mechanic. Druids do not have any really effective means of recovering mana if we do get mana drained, the bear and mod rods can only do so much. Constantly running self/group bw will allow us to hobble along due to the long recasts and slow cast time on main heal tho. The slow cast of base heal and long recasts on all the quicker patches means a druid has to really pay attention and guess right more than other healing classes. It is just so easy to get caught between stools when you are pointed the wrong way when a quick heal is needed NOW! This translates to a lot more specialized button pushing in a box crew. It can be done just not as easily as with a cleric, who also brings so many more toys to the healing party.
