Possible Class Combos for 3-box?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Trosh, Jan 10, 2015.

  1. Trosh

    Trosh New Member

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    So, I realize you can 3-box, which of course leads me to the question.. what are some of the better combos?

    An important note should be made here that if you want to play a specific character as your main for raiding and whatnot, it is a simple thing to base your group around that character. Say, for example, you wish to play a rogue the most. You could form a group around the rogue, either using it as a tank, or fear kiting, or having a tank and shaman or cleric.. there are many options. This list is mostly just particularly good 3-box combinations, but you can make just about anything work.

    So far I've come up with 3 techniques towards planning a group around 3 characters.. Classic, Cast and Crazy.

    Classic is a general setup involving a healer, a tank, and a damage dealer. There are a few ways you can go with this, in fact you could even dual-box instead of tri-box, if you wanted to. Here are a few of the ones I've come up with:

    1. Cleric, SK/Warrior, BL - Pretty straight-forward, and you have BL for slows and additional dps.
    2. Shaman, Mnk/SK/War, DPS - Super flexible, because you COULD just do a shm/mnk duo, but adding a dps gives you some more flexibility, Mage would probably be the dps I would do with this combo.
    3. Cleric, Chanter, SK - For insane people that can multi-task well, as you would be charming a pet with the enchanter.. and it can get REALLY messy REALLY fast.
    4. SK + Shaman + Mage - The SK/Sham duo can be a bit busy, so adding a simple mage (send pet, nuke, ds) really helps speed things up. This trio lacks easy crowd control. When leveling up, the SK's feign death is not as great for shedding casters as a monk's is, but this is a solid trio.
    5. Ranger + Cleric + Enchanter - I can't think of a melee trio that has everything this one has. Tracking, sow, snare, dual wield dps, ds, cleric buffs and heals, haste, mana regen, charm. At 60+ this can be turned into a charm kiting trio with the ranger bowing. I've run this with an SK instead of the ranger as well. It's good for more tankability when charm can't be relied on.
    6. Paladin + Shaman + Necro - I haven't personally run this, but I am really tempted to try it here on TAK (darn this busy new year!). This trio seems to have everything. Tank, buffs, rez, haste, snares, dots, self mana regens. It would excel at fighting multiple mobs at once with the dots and total heal power. I can only imagine how well this trio will destroy undead for AA's in the Luclin era. It does seem like a very busy trio though.

    Cast is simply the technique of using multiple casting classes in concert. There are oodles of ways to do this, but here are the ones I can think of:

    1. Necro, Mage/Dru, Wiz - For kiting, as Necros can do this by themselves, you just have some people with him to make it even quicker, all the necro has to do is darkness, sick pet, keep agro and run in circles.
    2. Chanter, Cleric, Shaman - For insane people; it is basically just a cheer-leading squad for the chanter, who will charm stuff with shammy debuffs.
    3. Mage, Mage, Mage - Childish and highly effective, but I'd never do it.
    4. Druid, Wiz, Dru/Wiz/Chanter - Taking your quad-kiting game to the max, as a wiz or druid can solo quad kite, you would just have more mana bars, and 2 always medding, to do it faster or the chanter for crack.
    5. Enchanter - Cleric - Druid - Ultimate charm trio. Snare and buffs from the druid, heals and stuns from the Cleric, mana regen and charm from the enchanter. Nothing causes stress like your only tank being an unreliable yellow/red charm. :)
    6. Cleric - Magician - Necro - I know I've put necro in a lot of these groups, but their utility really is helpful in a trio. You could also swap out cleric with druid for mobility. These would be fear kites, or mage pet tank groups. With a druid, you could charm in outdoor zones.
    7. Necro, Necro, Necro - Basically same things as 3x mages, except you are doing it with the best soloing class in-game.. childish, super effective.

    Crazy category are strange combos that you wouldn't normally think to use, are highly situational, or just don't seem like they would work but do.

    1. Pally, Clr, Nec - Undead crusader group, and by staying in undead-only zones, you could tear it up.
    2. Dru, Nec, Sham - The idea behind this is to root-rot, and only use DoT's because nukes will break the root.. I haven't ever tried it, and it just came to me in a wave of inspiration.
    3. Bard, Dru, Cler - Focuses on bards being cheaters with their aoe songs etc. and your dru and cleric would be backup or cleanup from a wipe.
    4, Wiz, Wiz, Wiz - Just seems masochistic to me.. but the idea I had behind it is you just try to kill the bad guy before you die, possibly using roots also, but it would be a race against time.
    5. Necro + Shaman + Rogue - Relying on fear in open areas, and slow with the shaman tanking in tight spaces. This would allow the rogue to stay at the back, with high dps from the necro as well. This would be good for level 60-65 farming as well, given the shaman and necro dot stacking and high synergy.

    I'm not sure what I want to go with, honestly.. I want to be a cleric main, so was leaning Clr, War, BL.. but I've never actually tried it out before, and am not sure how it would work. BL can be good for slows and additional DPS, but their slow isn't the best until 60 or 65. Alternatively I would probably do Shm, Mnk, Mage because it just seems like a pretty winning combo if you ask me.

    If you have any combos, or even another category, feel free to post them here! I will try to update the original post with new ideas or more detailed breakdowns via the responses, but I'm lazy so it may be a weekly or bi-weekly sort of deal.

    Edited and Updated with new ideas.

    tl/dr: What 3box combos do you like and why?
     
  2. Bandito

    Bandito New Member

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    On the former eqmac, I enjoyed a beastlord/druid/bard trio.

    The beast/druid is an obvious combo able to take on anything up to level 60 pretty easily and has nearly every utility covered.. tank/dps/heal triangle with tons of hp, stat, hp and mana regen buffs, haste, slows, damage shield, PORTS/EVACS and so on. Evacs are huge when you're dealing with boxes deep in a dungeon and can save you major headaches.

    The bard adds, in it's laziest form, awesome hp/mana regen on autofollow. You also get indoor pac puling and mez support for druid charms. More importantly, it opens up the ability to trio dragons and other annoying AE mobs as you get resist songs.

    The trio didn't seem as powerful in PoP however, as the beast started struggling to take hits from stuff like PoV fiends. The druid/bard still could do amazing things, but the beast was the weak link and left behind.
     
  3. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    paladin / necro two box works really well for me. i've done it on a few servers now. seems strange but necros and pallys together have enough healing power that the paladin can stay alive tanking some big targets, and the necro's high sustained DPS with DoTs harmonizes really well with the paladin's innate survivability. and together they can absolutely obliterate undead targets.

    edit -- slightly off topic i know since i'm talking about a two box combo rather than three box combo =p just reiterating though that off-the-wall class combos can actually work really well.

    if i ever add a third box i'll add a rogue, an enchanter, or a druid.
     
  4. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    I have a few trios I've worked with over the years. My usual rule is if I have a melee, I must have haste. I also avoid more than one melee, I've never been the type that could keep two melee focused.

    SK + Shaman + Mage - The SK/Sham duo can be a bit busy, so adding a simple mage (send pet, nuke, ds) really helps speed things up. This trio lacks easy crowd control. When leveling up, the SK's feign death is not as great for shedding casters as a monk's is, but this is a solid trio.

    Ranger + Cleric + Enchanter - I can't think of a melee trio that has everything this one has. Tracking, sow, snare, dual wield dps, ds, cleric buffs and heals, haste, mana regen, charm. At 60+ this can be turned into a charm kiting trio with the ranger bowing. I've run this with an SK instead of the ranger as well. It's good for more tankability when charm can't be relied on.

    Paladin + Shaman + Necro - I haven't personally run this, but I am really tempted to try it here on TAK (darn this busy new year!). This trio seems to have everything. Tank, buffs, rez, haste, snares, dots, self mana regens. It would excel at fighting multiple mobs at once with the dots and total heal power. I can only imagine how well this trio will destroy undead for AA's in the Luclin era. It does seem like a very busy trio though.

    I wanted to make sure I threw a trio out there with a rogue. I know rogues can be lacking on servers due to awkwardness in boxing two melee or having your rogue tank. What about this...

    Necro + Shaman + Rogue - Relying on fear in open areas, and slow with the shaman tanking in tight spaces. This would allow the rogue to stay at the back, with high dps from the necro as well. This would be good for level 60-65 farming as well, given the shaman and necro dot stacking and high synergy.

    All casters? I would do...

    Enchanter - Cleric - Druid - Ultimate charm trio. Snare and buffs from the druid, heals and stuns from the Cleric, mana regen and charm from the enchanter. Nothing causes stress like your only tank being an unreliable yellow/red charm. :)

    Without charm...

    Cleric - Magician - Necro - I know I've put necro in a lot of these groups, but their utility really is helpful in a trio. You could also swap out cleric with druid for mobility. These would be fear kites, or mage pet tank groups. With a druid, you could charm in outdoor zones.
     
  5. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    i haven't personally tried boxing two melee, but it seems like if you have the DPS melee /follow the tank through the fight you should be able to position things relatively decently by mostly just focusing on the tank's screen.
     
  6. Tarkon

    Tarkon Well-Known Member

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    I wanted to play a rogue. So I went with rogue / cleric / mage. This is a good dungeon group. You can take risks as you can do corpse recoveries (fairly) easily. With rogue sneak/hide plus cleric pacification it also allows you to split camps.
     
  7. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    That's a solid crew Tarkon. I think I'd go necro over Mage for possible outdoor kiting ability, but that combo will do well for your rogue. You'll be able to combine with the common tank/shaman duo too to be a solid group.
     
  8. Trosh

    Trosh New Member

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    I ended up going Shaman / Monk. I would like to 3box possibly in the future, but alt-tabbing between screen gets the alt key stuck and it was fairly annoying to deal with, so I'm using my desktop and laptop. if I did 3-box I probably would have added a mage as my 3rd, but perhaps necro or wizard.

    BTW anyone else trying Shaman / Monk I would recommend not doing Iksar for the races, simply because there is more gear and such available for others at this time. I think I'll probably be wearing cloth for a good long while on the monk lol.
     
  9. Tollen

    Tollen Member

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    267
    search the forums people have posted programs that the devs are ok with that allows you to set up hotkeys (I use num pad 1-3) to switch windows.

    Once someone get tailoring up cant Iksar use wu's? armor for the monk
     
  10. Dragonslayer

    Dragonslayer New Member

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    I was going for war,clr,mage or clr,ranger,wiz, or clr,rng,bst myself but thats just me /shrug
     
  11. Drevnor

    Drevnor New Member

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    What do you all think of warrior/shaman/monk as a three box? Currently have the shaman and warrior at 17 but thinking of adding the monk for dps/pulling
     
  12. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    If you can handle positioning two melee, then adding the monk is great for pulling utility and additional mana-free (except a haste every 6 mins) dps.

    If you find the melee positioning a pain, think about a necro (snare, self mana regen, FD for pulling, undead mez, dps), mage (dps, ds, pet off-tank) or enchanter (lull, mez, charm, mana regen) to enhance your current box.
     
  13. shortok

    shortok People Like Me

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    I'm probably going to end up doing CLR / ENC/ NEC (instead of druid)

    Worked well on alkabor. Stuns and roots available while enchanter runs around after charm break. Gonna end up using a lot of sow pots probably. Fear kiting at low levels..

    Necro was good for pulling and rezzing the cleric after a wipe, and levant, and corpse summoning, and twitches...
     
  14. Trosh

    Trosh New Member

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    I'll look for the program.. It would be nice to have a 3rd in party. I could just use the laptop and one client on each of my screens of the desktop, and that would work swimmingly I think!

    I did give up on the monk. Yeah, cured silk and wu's will eventually show up, but lots of other things aren't wearable by monks. The AC is also super messed up right now.. I struggle with chain heals to kill blues at level 11, whereas my lvl 8 mage's pet can walk right through yellows and low reds with only a couple heals. I ended up going cleric/mage, but if I could box my shaman into the mix I'd love to.
     
  15. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    Interesting choice. I don't think I've ever seen this trio. I know cleric/enchanters together can do amazing things. I usually see a druid or mage as the third. This sounds like it offers a bit more fun and a reset button with necro FD. Charming in undead places is going to be fun for you.
     
  16. Murrpau

    Murrpau New Member

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    You might have seen my 3 Iksar Necros on a corpse run by now. Here were the two combos I tried so far:

    SK, Enchanter, Druid: Feigning puller who's also a tank as well as a snarer and fear kiter. Enchanter for backup fears and charms and clarity. Druid for backup snares and all heals, as well as long duration snare for enchanter's pet between re-charms, and SoWs and ports and thorns. Druid is interchangeable with a shaman if you want to buff the hell out of the SK and charms.
    ^ I stopped playing this one because I'm new to the EQMac universe. I didn't even know you all existed until a few months ago, and when I was on my cushy live server I never knew there was this whole alternate universe where things were TOUGH! So it was really slow starting as a tank type, and I would rather come back to this when I have some cash money to blow on jewelry and stuff. Currently, that leaves me playing...
    Necro. NECRO. NECROOOOO: Childish and juvenile and sophomoric and unsophisticated? Perhaps.
    When you first get to a server and want to roll a tank, everyone says "roll a farming character first like a mage or necro". So I figured 3 necros have to be 3x as effective at farming Guk and so on. What are some pros and cons?
    Pro: Necro 1 casts fear. Necro 2 casts snare. Necro 3 has mana left over for both.
    Also, DoTs stack here (I heard that in the p99 thread)
    Additionally, if a necro is self-sufficient, then 3 are an orgy of self sufficiency.
    What else... you can even twitch yo'self. I don't know why you'd twitch a necro, except if it's something for the good of the group, like Necro A doesn't have enough mana to re-summon their pet.
    Oh, and, imagine a dungeon crawl of 6 monks using mend and feign to flipflop aggro. That's what you are: 3 floppers and 3 monk-like pets. If things go south, feign, resummon pet, get back in the fray. Or fear/snare it away.

    Cons: Eh, 3x the research or you'll have to fear kite/DoT your way through about 12 levels without useful pets.
    That's about it. Necros can do everything else.
     
  17. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    necro/necro/necro made me lol pretty hard hahaha

    definitely a good trio, though. try to find spots where you can use Spook the Dead instead of Fear (saves a ton of mana).

    and you might even be able to get away with agro kiting instead of fear kiting when things are dying three times as quick as a solo necro could kill them.
     
  18. Saskoris

    Saskoris Active Member

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    A lot of people are neglecting Bard/Necro synergy.

    Kage used this to max effect on alkabor.
     
  19. Suriinya

    Suriinya Well-Known Member

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    I've been soloing my Enchantress for the most part, but I intend to add a cleric and necro soon. I played with a ENC/CLR/SK trio on AK but decided to swap the necro for SK here to give it a shot.
     
  20. phresh2k3

    phresh2k3 Member

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    Hello peeps, I have a question for you.

    Would Warrior/Cleric/Enchanter be better

    or Shadowknight/Cleric/Enchanter better?

    Warrior Pros:
    1) Higher defense (better mitigation)
    2) Higher HP
    3) Higher skill caps?

    Shadowknight Pros:
    1) Higher dps
    2) Invis/IVU for lguk farming
    3) FD
    4) mana which takes full advantage of always having clarity

    I doubt i'mma raid much, just mostly dungeon crawls. Thanks!
     
  21. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    I'm not so sure SK's put out better damage than warriors. Certainly not in the first few expansions we'll be playing through. The gap might close a bit in Luclin/PoP.

    SK's will provide that group with feign death for pulling, snare, and snap aggro.
    A warrior will provide set-it-and-forget-it tanking, and you wont have to meditate. They are a bit easier to box than the SK if you aren't used to boxing.
     
  22. phresh2k3

    phresh2k3 Member

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    Yes, the set-it-and-forget it mechanism is quite valuable in 3 boxing. Additionally, i forgot to take into consideration that even though they would both currently use BABS which means similiar dmg output, one day the warrior will be able to use yaks.

    I guess warrior it is!
     
  23. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    yeah i second the thought that warrior is better than SK as a third for cleric/enchanter. the only real advantage an SK would have is Feign Death. between your cleric and your enchanter you can do a lot of the other tricks that an SK could do. and with Root on both your ench and your cleric you won't even really have to worry about the tank holding agro that much. just make sure to keep the mobs rooted and your warrior can tank all day.

    edit -- thought of another disadvantage tho.... SKs have snare spells and warriors/clerics/enchanters don't. so if you're dungeon crawling you'll be relying on root rather than snare to deal with runners. still not that big of a deal but i suppose it is something to consider.
     
  24. Trosh

    Trosh New Member

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    Like people have said, yeah a warrior would probably be your best bet. Warriors do have higher skill caps and they also have more effective AC, so if you will only be doing a classic setup of tank and spank, warrior would be best. I would recommend thinking about swapping the enchanter out for a dps class like a necro or mage, however. Necro would be good for the snares and pulling singles, but either way you are going to be lacking a bit on your dps. Chanters are sick because they have nice buffs and crowd control, but they can be a handful to box.

    If you were curious about the AC stuff, you can find a more detailed breakdown of it here: http://www.takproject.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2169
     
  25. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    I kind of agree that you'll get more benefit from your trio if the chanter is a necro. Mage is nice too for damage shield, if you're fine with rooting on the cleric.

    However, warrior/cleric/enchanter would be an awesome backbone for any group you start. You can also dabble into charming when you get good at boxing. You're going to be loved for buffs come Luclin and if you're a fan of being loved by newbies everywhere, you'll have cleric/enchanter MGB.
     
  26. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    i've been doing paladin/necromancer/druid, what do you guys think of that trio?

    i've two boxed paladin/necromancer a lot on other servers, to good effect. i plan on using pal/necro/druid for dungeon crawling once i get better at managing three boxes (never really have done three before).
     
  27. Trosh

    Trosh New Member

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    I like it. Pally/Necro by itself sounds fun, but will be super easy with the druid backup (not to mention oh-sh*t button aka evac) Boxing a druid is fairly simple, all you need to do is keep buffs up during downtime, heal, and snare if the mob is a runner. Saves mana for necro having to snare, so he/she can dps more. Pallies are also my fav tanking class, just because no one plays them. You would probably have loads of fun killing in undead zones, too.
     
  28. Ransom

    Ransom Well-Known Member

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    Yeah I'm a fan of this trio in concept. You have everything except slow, haste and mana regen. All three classes can heal in some fashion, you have sow, snare, necro snare, FD, teleports, damage shield, stuns, lull, harmony, track, stackable buffs (druid skin, paladin symbol). And when it all hits the fan you can FD with necro or rez with paladin. You can charm kite with the druid in outdoor zones or target undead in indoor zones. Sounds fun.
     
  29. Dll

    Dll New Member

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    I've bounced around alot already,but I think I have landed on Sk cleric shaman for now. Not a lot of boxing experience here though. .. any thoughts on my trio
     
  30. shortok

    shortok People Like Me

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    I like it. Cleric and Shaman jobs can mostly be taken care of with '/cast #, /pause #' buttons when you're feeling lazy.