I recently started playing my Mage again and got her from 70 to 89 now (with about 1700 AA ), and I am glad that I did. I forgot how much fun it can be
Now I started to add her to my Ranger which is lvl 100 at about 6kAA and I am planning to level her to 92 (for the 91 pet and RoF gear ) and stay there for a while to max out AA.
I plan on adding a 3rd class to support them, but I cannot decide which one would benefit them the most. I am torn between Shaman and Bard.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated
My setup is mage/mage/bard/ranger/shaman.. and honestly the order i listed them in is pretty much the priority I view them in terms of box effectiveness for me. (obviously when mercs are not an option though shaman importance increases drastically)
Bard is really nice but honestly I don't feel bards boost rangers a ton with pet tanks. Most songs and such will not proc from archery (and rangers must use archery on a burn for ideal dps, they only really melee when their archery disc is down, and if you are using a pet tank you may not ever want em to melee)
Rangers can pull pretty effectively, not as well as bards but they do well.. i'd say to go for a 2nd mage even though rangers dont boost 2 mages as well as a bard does. 2 mages are still an extremely potent combo, gives you a lot of room for error and if one pet dies the 2nd will take over and you have plenty of time to recast and rebuff the first pet.
Last edited by Falore on Wed Mar 13, 2013 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Roll a bard, you won't regret it. But depending on your play style, you could roll a cleric and run 3 dps caster mercs. I think most boxers rely too much on the cleric mercs. I was running my max aa raid gear mage was dps merc and was killing things much faster than some grps. 2 mages is wasted tanking in my mind. Also you might ponder a port class. Druid are incredible healers too.
I try not to play with a Merc. Until you get to 96+, most mages can manage w/o.
Roll a shm if you really want a 3rd box. I find my ranger/mage doesn't need a bard anymore, which I used to do alot. Rangers have enough overhaste AAs, as you know, and some dps AA is always up. Doesn't take long for burn combo's to be available.
Don't forget Mage pet has FBO for overhaste, at max AAs it's available 25% of the time and runs ~2 mins. So basically anytime you need something, some kind of uber ability is up. I just wasn't using my bard so dropped her. Mana regen and spell focus is nice and all, but it was overkill. I found it kinda depressing that I worked so many thousand AAs into mage and ranger and I didn't get to use their abilities to max potential since the bard always had something up. But if you like playing on steroids 100% of the time, bard is your ticket.
Shm slows and your trio will take on anything. Bard slows not as good. Shm's get slows on AAs around 81. And lets not forget how awesome the shm epic is for melees. Very little compares to it, all shm's I know use their epic clicks to 100. Bards, not so much.
shm epic helps pets but a bard unleashes the true potential of the mage dps aswell. Bard aura, proc songs, SoB click and epic are hard to beat. With the cc and mana regen ( tie in crescendo to your melody also) its ridiculous how much downtime you avoid.
