I have a long rich history playing EverQuest off and on since beta. I played Vanguard from launch an absolutely feel in love with the rogue and small raids. I have not found a melee class in this game quite like the Vanguard rogue. So far I like the monk. My current box set up consist of 100 Magician and Druid. I have 90+ Cleric, Enchanter, and Monk. My magician is my main, and absolutely boring to play. However, for a caster group can't beat the magicians pet for a tank. My Besides buffs, the Enchanter doesn't bring much sustainable DPS in box setup. People keep telling me how slow is required, but I find the mob is either dead shortly after it lands or its partially resisted. Call me crazy, but healing with cleric seems natural. Overkill for most groups. I thought switching my setup to melee, so I can play my monk. However, that would require me playing one of those overly gear dependent things we call a tank. I will be doing some small raid instances, so healer is absolutely required. If I keep the caster group I would probably add a necromancer for the Enchanter, and swamp in the cleric for druid in any raid instancing. I would really like to keep my box setup to three, because of cost. What does everyone think...
Necro requires quite a lot of management, and enc provides awesome ADPS, CC and can put out good DPS themselves if focused on. From a purely functional perspective I would keep the enc and add another caster to your lineup - the necro would work, or maybe a wiz if you wanted easier boxing. Slow definitely isn't required - your druid's attack debuffs probably help more, but the enchanter's CC will be invaluable in a lot of content. However, if you say you don't find casters fun then you should go for the monk, although it is going to be a lot more work.
An Enchanter brings quite a lot of sustainable DPS, both through ADPS (IoG/3rd/Haze/Auras) and through respectable self DPS. I don't have much advice as far as what option you should choose boxing wise, but it sounds like your Enchanter has unused potential (due to level/AA possibly).
I don't have too many problems with adds. Combination of Magician druid most everything comes solo. I have necromancer in the 70s and find him easy to box. The Enchanter (besides buffs) just requires too much work from a boxing stand point.
If you want to play monk then make a shaman box. On trash mobs I use 2 wizard mercs and have the monk tank and shaman heal. On named I use a tank merc and cleric merc. With this combo you can do almost any content and it is a ton of fun to play as well. If you are going to 3 box then you should add a bard or a tank of your choice to this.
I've found that necro's require pretty much non-stop casting, with the non-linked cooldowns between 3 swift DoTs, there is no cooldown to wait on. If you are non-stop casting every 1-1.5 seconds, you are just matching dps of other cloth dps. I dunno how anything can be more button intensive
What can be more "button intensive" is casting just as many spells, but also tapping your AA nukes social between every cast, like wizards do
I don't care to match the dps of someone solely playing one character. All I want to do is get some exp when groups don't exist. Also, I would like to have one of my characters have a shot at raids. I keep hearing how hard group content is, but honestly I don't buy it. Maybe hard for a merc group, but a full group just plows through the content. I know I can get more dps out of necro than I can playing enc. Maybe if I ditch the cleric and pay more attention to enc life would be better. However, I cannot bring a merc into raid instance so the cleric is required. Maybe I will give the shaman monk a try.
Slow is not necessary in today's game.. but it's nice. The one that is the real kicker though is cripple. You get more bang for your buck out of that than slow IMO. And yeah, a solo necro vs a solo enchanter, the necro is going to do more dps... but an enchanter just running twincast+mana reverb with a couple wiz mecs half way nuking is going to provide more damage thorugh Adps+personal dps than the necro without Adps. It's up to your play style, but at 105 all you have to do to do dps with a chanter is get your three top damage spells, and nuke in a button and your adps will kick in. (You can do much more if you focus on the chanter with twincast mezzes etc.) Here is the kicker though. Play what you enjoy. If you don't like it? you won't play it. Some people just don't enjoy a chanter.
lol yea I can imagine. My mage has a AA nuke/banestrike social I made to spam. But to compare, when it comes to boxing, between necro and mage (the only classes I know), on a 2mob pull of TDS mobs: - necro can cast 3 30s Dots on each mob, a swarm, and 3 swift dots in a row. 10 casts - mage can cast one rain, one spear, and one Garg. 3 casts and it will do more damage than the necro's 10 casts for the next, ehhh 6-8 seconds. So much more effecient from a boxing standpoint If Mage has only 1 spear, 2 rains, 1 bolt, 1 servant, and one "of many" nuke memmed, they can be non-stop casting if u stagger the cooldowns. But really mages tend to pause in box comps mostly due to mana. But Mage def needs less casts than necro due to how awesome rains are
If you aren't spam nuking as a mage, you're doing it wrong. Now you can do meh damage without spam nuking, but you're way below your potential. It's likely that to do comparable DPS to Necros you don't need to do that much, but that's a whole different can of worms (class balancing issues make my head hurt). If you're going to box a Mage, you should have him nuking as much often as possible. Edit: To put it another way, if your mage can do 20-30k by just casting a few nukes, that's fine. But the toon could be doing 50-60K (or maybe more/less, depends how good at boxing you are). So even though you don't "need" to spam your spells, you would benefit a lot by doing so.
Seems to me you should re-evaluate HOW you box before deciding on which classes to box. I box with [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software]. My E key is bound to activate several hotbuttons at once on my hotbutton bar. I press E the first time, which [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] rebroadcasts to all six screens, the first button on the hotbar activates. If that first button/spell is in cool down, it goes to the second button, and so forth. My banestrikes are part of my /assist macro. (line one: /pause 10, /assist; line two, /alt act 15xx whatever bane strike is). I can put my heals in a similar spam rotation. Cleric's targetting macro is basically /pause 3, /assist group; /assist, which aquires mob's target, then I can do my spam heals sequence, which for me is the L key. On my druid and enchanter main boxes, I have a debuff macro set up that is launched at the beginning of some of the harder mobs. Basically, box smarter, not harder. Every class I've played has keys that are to be spammed throughout the fight. Might as well set them all to one key and spam that one key till mob is dead. One note on enchanter: if you're doing raids, enchanters traditionally are more likely to land a nuke on the mob. That's not a rule, but chromatic based nukes are nice. My level 4 group geared enchanter nukes for around 170k, for what it's worth. Edit 1: my enchanter is 104, not level 4. My level 4 enchanter does not nuke for 170k.
A Mage spamming his spells is going to oom, though. My Mage has max mr AA, KotP from raid gear, shawl proc, AND two different sympathetic mana procs, the cotf specialize conjuration AND evocation augs, and necro mana regen (mind strip) running, so juuuust about the most amount of personal MR a character can possibly have without being completely maxed out (there is still I think 2 levels of KotP and tribute still, I don't bother with tribute much), and he will oom using spears and Garg every time they are up. After about 4-5 quick kills he'll be pushing 75%, so a mod rod or a gather potential will top him back off. But a few more kills and he'll be going down again. That's with a rotation of Garg - rain 1 - rain 2 - spear - bolt - of many strike - repeat (casting every possible second) Without using gather potential or having necro mana return buff, I imagine the Mage would oom in about 10-15 fast tds kills
That seems like exceptionally high mana usage... I use RS->Rain->Rain->Spear, and I switch to Rain->Rain->Spear->Spear when the mob is around 50%, and I can go for at least half an hour (often longer) of non-stop casting before running out (and I avoid using Gather unless I'm below 40%). I do box an enchanter, but he runs DPS auras and uses 3rd spire, so the only regen stuff I'm getting from him are the group GoM proc and the robe click. Now, if I can't use rains for whatever reason, then I can definitely see mana being an issue.
I love my enchanter for what she brings to the party. The Aura's alone add greatly to the groups DPS, and turns merc casters into machine guns. and once an Enchanter gets the aa where they can proc group Chromatic Haze on any nuke you will see a dramatic jump in group DPS, it fun hitting for 600K+ a pop and watching mobs go from 50% health to zero in a second.
When we did the Stardouser mini-raid in Korafax, I thought it might actually be hard... Not so much... Stardouser in 6s, 1003k @167130 -- #1 Sancus 910k@(910420 in 1s)
I box mage, druid, bard as my main 3 box, it's fantastic. Bard adds a ton in so many ways, and is a fantastic puller. Not sure how much you're into macros, but I would get into them if I were you. My mage and my druid are 1 button push per fight, something like this (just for example) on the mage. /pause 3, /assist *whatshisname /petattack /pause 40, /cast 1 /pause 40, /cast 1 /cast 1 Assists the bards pull target, sends in pet, nukes 3 times. Same thing on the druid, I have a macro for snare, and dot, and also a burn macro for 3 nukes. Once you get used to macros and get them set up, your mage and druid should never be more than 1 button press per fight unless something gets weird. The buffs from the bard, + the fire debuffs from the druid, plus the druid fire nukes, plus the mage fire nukes = ridiculous damage. I've tested this against having a wiz on burn (which is also another super easy box), and the end result was I did about the same party DPS, but got a ton more utility from the bard. Bards are AMAZING box characters, best puller in the game, regens, mez, tons of added DPS, best 3 box in the game in my opinion, after trying every possible combo I could think of. Bard / Mage /Druid has every base covered really, and has one of the best, if not thee best synergy in the game. Highly recommended. The problem that you're going to get into with the monk, is that the mage pet won't hold agro if there is another player melee character in range. Not so much a problem if you're using a tank merc, but can be a huge problem if you're soloing content with no mercs. You're much better off just letting the mage pet tank, and keeping the druid and bard out of range.
