What is the difference on the solo abilities of the Mage vs Necro ?

No healer? Kite not an option?
For a necro with no healer its all about your 3 best swarm pets, focus and AA's.

Forget to get merc up, whatever I have tools.

Swarms share timers now

Fire pets have never had AOE spells, DD only, the only thing I can think of is the DS they have. Otherwise your son is using AE spells. Also, not having used fire in quite sometime, I don't believe they have many HPs, so they die rather fast.

I haven't used a fire pet in forever but I'd imagine it could have been useful on the 17th anniversary raid since is was mostly a ranged fight.

"Swarms share timers now"
Thanks for that heads up Brohg. I have been away for months and I was considering paying up for a year and coming back, but this swarm nerf has given me pause.

It was pret-ty sploity the old way. They're still really good, but aren't an entire third mode of necromancering on their own now

As i see it, this reduces group value even further while also a major hit to the molo game.
Oh well at least i am glad i found out before i paid up, later EQ

Not to derail too much, but since this keeps coming up:

A long time ago, Fire Pet spells above level 50 summoned pets that were literally wizards. They used wizard nukes and would even use wizard AoEs/rains (which had horrible, mangled, terrible consequences when in a group with a mezer, since there was no way to specifically tell the pet not to AoE). The Kindle spell (and similar) was there to help them regen their mana back (since they would burn through it very fast) but in practice, any mage above 50 running a fire pet was pretty much doomed to Reclaim and Resummon him to make him get his mana back.

I remember wiping my party in Dragons of Norrath because I thought, "Hee hee, I'll use the fire pet for a change of pace! That'll be fun! " And then it broke mez with spells, and my party told me never to summon a fire pet again.

They also weren't even that good of damage and a water pet was still totally better DPS when positioned behind for stabby-stab.

Eventually, SoE (now DBG) patched fire pets to be the single-target, single-ability, ranged fire-flingers we know them as today. I'm not sure when this was changed, but it was sometime after Dragons of Norrath was current.

Just a bit of mage nostalgia and trivia. I figure that someone is probably still around who remembers the fire pets from back then even better than I do though. I only rarely used one, and my mage at the time was my alt.

Get a necro to 105, you won't ever have to med again, with AAs that give to mana every 5 and 10 minutes (in combat and out of combat). Literally, its cast after cast non-stop and the only time you'll ever sit for mana would be those long raid fights. But that's post Level 95

A necro on Phiny will have a good mana pool but sit constantly yet still be an excellent addition in groups. But a necro on Phiny will be one of the few soloing classes so while you wait or to gear you'd have one of the best classes for the job. There's nothing more daunting on a tlp server to be max level (or near max, as my 52 Bard is) and unable to solo my Old Seb key -- The Frogs Are Literally Greenies!