I'm going to come back to TAKP and am trying to figure out what trio I should play, and also where I should level. I have almost no PoP experience. When should I stop using mage epic in PoP? What zones are good for leveling 51-65? Can someone ELI5 on flagging progression in PoP? I was maining mage/clr/ench pre-PoP but kind of got burned out from charming. Requires more focus than I want when grinding eq. I'm thinking I may return to mage/mage/shaman, would that be a viable trio to grind to 65 with?
First thing to know about PoP is mage pets lose their potential for tanking generally speaking. You’re not going to be able to do Mage pet tank with shaman slow/healer in any zones beyond tier 1 with any sort of effectiveness. Mage epic pet falls off once the pet is too low for his nukes to be landing reliably due to level differential. I’d say most zones T2+ it’s worth using water pet over epic pet. Mage/Enc/Cler is one of the strongest PoP combos but as mentioned charming can wear on you if you’re wanting to casually clear a group camp and AFK occasionally. If you’re intent on keeping magician in the trio and not charming I’d say Beastlord Mage Cleric. Beastlord would be star of the trio and need the most gear. They’d slow, pull and tank. Mage would Malo and bring pet DPS and summoned pet weapons. Cleric CHs Beastlord. Main weakness of this trio is lack of CC. Cleric root works but mostly you’re going to need to split with CotH or Pacify split. Granted most typical PoP camps don’t really require a bunch of splitting but there are some points where you have a 2 or 3 pull you’re going to have to deal with. Another thing to keep in mind we have alpha PoP flagging. This means unless you raid you have access to only the original 4 PoP zones and you have access to PoJ trials which can unlock Valor/Storms and the Askr’s quest in storms which unlocks BoT. But to get into Tactics, HoH, Torment, CoDecay you’d need to raid or do an alternate quest which only flags 1 character at a time. Elemental planes will always be raid flag only.
PoP does bring back kiting in a big way if thats a playstyle that appeals to you. Or root-rotting or anything else you can think to do to things that won’t summon you. You still need a mana pool big enough to kill, maybe only an issue with quadding, but otherwise much less gear dependent than any form of tanking. I dabbled with snareless quadding with wiz/wiz/bard and it was definitely viable.
Charm swarming is great in some PoP zones too. More of a single toon activity, but still good xp for a trio.
Great info. I'm once again leaning toward bst/mag/clr, which I had planned to swap to before quitting a few months ago.
