Thinking of 2 boxing theseFollow

Funny how this question, or a variant of it, gets asked a lot!

I started with a druid and then made an enchanter, at first mainly to have my own access to mind buffs. But it was an overall good combo for me except for tanking tougher mobs. Didn't have mercs then but had I been able to add a warrior+cleric merc, I would have been "golden" for most camps.

Moral of the story is that the right mercs added to almost any duo makes for a pretty solid group. Mercs provide tanking+healing/buffing. So the main things a group could use that's missing from that combo are slows, ports/evacs and pulling/crowd control. Yeah, there are other utilities which help a lot but IMO these are the big "essentials." I'd say a rogue-shaman+mercs is weak on portings, which is more of a time-saver, although evac can save you a lot of grief and downtime! The same combo is weak on crowd control, which can be critical in some important situations.

Tank mercs may work for the common trash in SoD but nameds are not going to work for you. I have tried.

I wanted to try it out so I traded my cleric merc for a tier 3 tank on my level 84 mage. This guy http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?id=31284 ate through him like a light snack, hehe. Granted I usually run 3 clerics with my pet tanking so I was down a cleric but they didn't even really have time to heal him he went down so fast.

So I was a little disappointed being I was exactly where I was supposed to be, in Field of Scale, and the tank mercs don't hold up enough to get the nameds killed.

You may also want to consider the significant increase in mob difficulty in Underfoot and its impact on dual boxing. By all accounts (the NDA was lifted earlier today), mercs won't be much help in Underfoot, grouping will be needed and the relative power of different classes will shift once again.

I didn't participate in beta testing, so I don't know the details, but the gist of it appears to be that the expansion will be hard and not box-friendly. Mob DPS and HP are up significantly, mob density is high, there are numerous see invis and summoning mobs, fast respawn, there is need for crowd control, etc. Tellingly, the expansion that UF has been frequently compared to is GoD, one of the toughest expansions to date. Unless the content gets re-tuned after release, it doesn't look like the average boxer will be in a position to take advantage of it, but then again, he may not need to if groups are plentiful.

On the other hand, since the original poster's characters are at level 71 with very few AAs, boxing may be a good way to get to 85/1000+ when UF becomes viable. And by then who knows what UF will look like or what the next expansion will bring?

Edited, Nov 26th 2009 11:30am by Muon

It also would never happen, why increase the drop rate of old stuff when they want you to buy the new expansion?