Yes essentially, divine avatar on cooldown, and 2 glorious nukes + inters/contras to fill gaps. Not sure how the new priest 2hander parses in comparison I haven't got EOK on my cleric yet. I heard rumblings it parsed well, but didn't hear much in particular.
If you're replacing a DPS merc, you can play that new char well below potential, and still be doing more DPS than the merc.
The thing is, I have on occasion had a bad pull or just had a roamer come by that I'm slow to notice. In my current group if I lose my healer merc I'm usually boned. I've pulled it off once or twice by hitting a few things on warrior and ranger healing for the win, but I'd much rather have a better backup plan. I'm not even a little concerned about dps or lack of dps. Trash mobs drop in less than 30 seconds and most namers don't live over a minute. I know as well as probably everyone else that plays that I'll never be able to equal a group with people playing 1 apiece. Yeah it gets tiresome running a whole crew around, but after playing multiple toons for so long I'd be bored playing one. Like I stated earlier, my play time is awkward and I have to leave the keyboard frequently. Some nights I can only manage to play an hour and sometimes 6. Not many groups like to be constantly waiting on one fella in a pickup group, but I still want to play and progress. It's the best option for me, it's not for everyone. I just don't understand the bad attitude people have with boxers.
I didn't see any negativity about boxing. I saw people trying to give advice on how to best maximize your boxing. Adding more boxes can be a net negative unless you're really proficient or using third party software. That's what people were commenting on.
Appreciate that, but my rant wasn't about this post. It's just that I see and hear a lot of negative comments about boxing on forums and general chat.
I'm not against boxing. I'm an avid 3 boxer. However, once a person becomes a 4,5, or even 6 boxer, then that's all they ever do. 5 or 6 toons is a lot of farming. All the boxers I ever see are constantly in farm mode and NEVER beat an expansion. Then they really get a taste of alt-ing which requires even more farming. If that is your path, then go for it. But let's drop all the talk about how much adps a 5th adds because it's a net loss in group dps. Any ranger, zerker, monk, rogue, beast, mage, wizard not mashing something every second is losing dps including any adps attached to those abilities. Auto attack is not dps. Example. Rangers summers is .5 sec cast with 1.5 sec recast. Benefits from druid and chanter aura, chanter dicho, I assume bard aria, as well as potions. If you are away from you ranger for 10 secs then you missed 5 casts. How much dps was just lost? Not to mention procing gift of mana for ranger dicho. And that's only one ability on one toon. Now if what you really seek is back up heals, then use 2 healer mercs. Mercs and rytans reckless renewal is enough healing to 3 box with achievements every single EOK mission. Its even enough for me to 3 box enslaver of souls. Merc healing is greater for overall dps potential than player healing, because you get to pull more mobs at once and mash away on you dps class.
As long as you are factoring the added time of the box toon and giving it's scaled downward dps a proper weight to calculate the return on investment that point can make sense. There is a threshold where it becomes a net loss of time/effort, despite the per mob dps being slightly higher with less then properly played toon. Now where that threshold is and if a person can maintain a playing level above it for extended periods of time, is arguable. I've 4 to 6 boxed quite abit, though very rarely in newer content, I've found when mobs are dying in the sub 30s range i cannot get favorable results from added toons. Now that's just me, it is entirely possible someone else's threshold could be 20s kills or something like that. It's not quite just as easy as "more dps then merc so better". However your point is pretty close to true if the effort required doesn't negatively impact the result.
With IS Boxer I am sending commands to all toons all the time, only time a toon is not doing something is if I am CCing with my enchanter. The fun part of this is to decompose a fight into phases, and get your toons to do as much as possible in each of those phases. With my Logitech mouse with 10 buttons I can send those orders with my right hand, while doing other stuff with the left. One of the buttons on the mouse mashes multibind on all toons, another does assist + 4 AA/spells, a third launches attack mode, sending in pets, swarms, anulling magic, tashing, slowing, etc. Most AAs are on cooldowns most of the time. It is no where close to maining a toon, but very far from autoattacking. Also, when I take the time to position the Bard for meleeing, I am still mashing multibinds and what have you. It is quite intense playstyle, and I get tired after a few hours with 3 toons, but I can easily imagine someone more hard core than me doing 4,5,6 toons with good effect. A nice thing is that it feels a bit like running a party in Icewind Dale There is a large effort in setting up the phases. How many types of Oh-poop buttons should I have? What goes in the target select phase, and what goes in the launch attack phase? As dps starts to grow with increased AA etc, it becomes necesary to make changes. This is very nice part of the game, planning and preparing tactical modes.
Op is not using automation. IS boxer cots money last I checked. Another thing to cosnider if going that route.
You're right, I don't use any added software. You're also wrong, I've beat every expansion for years now, usually within months. I believe even auto-attack IS dps if it beats out a merc. If I have no problem with content playing 5 I don't see where the problem is. There's a reason people like a full group with different classes in it, the breadth of abilities they bring. Just because I box why should I go without those added utilities. Like I said before I know I'm not getting the most out of guys, maybe I'll get less with a 5th,but the 5th will help my other 4 live longer.
You're actually in the same position I was a couple months ago. I box a war/bard/mage, had them pretty much maxed out and was looking for something to improve my group a bit. I couldn't decide between trying to add a healer to allow for me to control healing more, or add DPS. In the end, I did both and made a berserker and a cleric. I'm still not sure how it'll play out but I chose a cleric over a shaman/druid Like ChaosFlux says, a poorly played cleric can still heal very well. You're an experienced boxer, so I think the comments in this thread about adding a character possibly being a net negative are something you already know. You've already got a pretty sick group, and you know you can put the warrior in 2H mode, get 2 cleric mercs, sit the bard in the corner playing songs and popping ADPS, and basically beat the snot out of everything in EoK with your warrior tanking groups of mobs with a 2H, your ranger / beastlord assisting. So you have to ask yourself where do you want to go from here? What problems are you trying to solve? Are you trying to beat old raids that you're having trouble with beating on a cleric? Are you trying to beat the couple TBM group missions on your own? Are you just looking for a well rounded group and your cleric merc let you down one too many times? The other good thing about having a box team set up is that you can farm hunter achievements in EoK while in a fellowship with multiple alts getting fed vitality. EoK gives such amazing XP you can level alts without hassle up to 105 very quickly via vitality.
Excellent comments and very helpful. Was nearly gonna go Sham but I think I've made my mind up to go Cleric. Wanna thank everyone for the helpful advice.
Not to be too nitty, but just want to clarify... ISB is not automation. One command can be sent to one, two, three,... or all screens. After that command is processed, nothing else happens, until you give another command. It's more command multiplexing. You're hitting buttons/commands constantly, just like raw boxing, with the exception that you don't have to be constantly swapping screens. The 3rd party s/w that shall not be named does support automation. You can run scripts and walk away. That's why that one is not allowed (to be used, or mentioned). As to the cost of using ISB, the most expensive way to do it comes to $5/month. Even for a student, that's as close to negligible as it gets. Tat
Cleric played in background will give your more bang on your group heals, and target heals than any other healer. You can also use his stuns to assist your group tanking slightly. What I would miss if I didn't have a pocket shaman is his Buffs You may seriously consider a Bard however...Best and easiest class to box hands off with melodies. Will add immensely to your mele output, and healing regeneration. You also have the ability to single target Mez, and AE mez for escape.
How do you send one keystroke to multiple screens? I might be misremembering but when I looked it up this was not a supported feature for ISB.
Watch a YouTube video, that's the only reason to use Is box is broadcasting. You can broadcast globally, broadcast individually, set up say 1 on your main screen to send 123 to other screens or any variation there off. Example on my paladin I can hit 1, this would hit 2 (melee keybind) and 3 on my beast (spell bind). Hitting 10 would activate a social that would make my boxes target my paladin, follow, hit Delos then group invis. With intelligent use of socials and or an auto fire gamepad a rudimentary amount of automation is achieveable. The thing about tools is they can often be employed in a way other than intended with a little thought and creativity.
