The Magician's Tower

Hello All,
I finally settled on boxing my Druid and Mage. Was tri-boxing for awhile but just a little too much work to worry about 3 chars. Anyways, just wondering if I can improve or change anything and how others might be doing something similar.

I have not tested it much on whether I should use merc tank and healer with air or water pet for dps, or merc healer and caster dps with air or earth pet tanking. Any insight? I have EM 11 and most of the pet defensive AA that I can see. Around 1000 aa on the mage, 600 on the druid.

I use the druid for backup heals, some dps, debuffs, and PORTS. I have a shaman I could use instead but I am addicted to the ease of porting everywhere, and teleport bind

Anyways. I usually pull with druid and when back at camp I have a hotkey on the mage

assist druid
pet attack
cast RS
cast bolt
cast shock

Can I improve on that at all?

Then on the druid I have a hotkey to
AA blessing of ro debuff
cast another debuff
cast dot
cast dot
cast cold&fire nuke

I need to work on using more of the druid's stuff as they have so many tools to use. But this seems to work ok for the most part. Just wanted to see if I was missing anything glaring that would help me be more efficient. I also am looking for a good grind spot to work on my low AA problem, but I will leave that for another post.

I don't see a problem with your setup, but I do have a question about the spells you are casting.

On mage, you should be doing RS, spear, bolt/spear. Is the "shock" you refer to above the "of many" line or is it Shock of argathian steel (magic nuke)?

If it's the "of many", drop it because you don't have enough pets up to make it worthwhile and if it's the magic nuke I can only assume you are using it because you may have mana issues. It's very efficient mana wise, but has horrible dps.

Personally, in groups I do RS, fickle, spear, fickle, bolt with a slight delay between spear and 2nd fickle.

Fickle and bolt have identical DPM (best of your fire nukes outside "of many" pet permitting), with bolt being slightly better for DPS.

Any weave you are doing however should have the 95 spear in it. It's the best bang for your buck outside of the "of many" line with full pet support.

I don't really have mana issues especially if using a mount. I guess it was just ignorance and a throwback to my conjuration spec days when I just chained the magic nuke between pet heals hah.

Thanks for the tips, that's just what I was looking for.

Personally I would use earth pet to tank. Reason being if you encoutner a named in VoA, a lot of them AE and you can mitigate the crap out of it by just keeping the group at range from the mob. If you are using a merc tank and a water pet the merc healer than has to decide which thing to heal and they tend to make easy fights harder.

Also in considering your spells for mage and druid how fast are things dying? Is mana not an issue for either? If that is the case load up your best nukes. Dot are great for logner fights on druid BUT if things are dying quickly, DoT become less useful in shorter fights. Also if longer fight you can consider all teh druid debuff lines, some mod spell damage for ice or fire or lower resist/AC. The cast order is correct though if you are using dot, use them before nukes to get most out of them. You might want to consider using Roar of Kolos (just dont open with it). Largest nuke with a stun (so damage and free mitigation).

Run your Druid Aura (either forst or fire) though betting that was default.

Just my two cents.

What they ^^ said.

I box mage/shammy. On mage my hotkey is RS/95 Spear/90 Spear/Bolt. Shammy I have about 5 DoTs on hotkey, but 1st manually slow the mob using slow AA, and sic shammy pet before pressing the DoT hotkey. On T4 trash mobs, I usually only press the mage hotkey 1 time per mob, then perhaps a manual nuke or two or an RS. Shammy DoTs are generally either worn off or almost worn off right when the mob dies. I just use one healer merc unless I'm fighting a named or in a place that I might get adds, then I either pop out a 2nd healer merc or the wizzy merc.

Thanks all, made a few of the changes suggested and should have some time to mess around with it tonight.

Just to throw a wrench into the situation, am I gimping myself boxing a druid over a shaman? I love ports but is shaman just the plain stronger partner?

Kraymerica wrote:Just to throw a wrench into the situation, am I gimping myself boxing a druid over a shaman? I love ports but is shaman just the plain stronger partner?

I think so, yes. True, the druid gives you the convenience of ports, but the shammy is king of buffs, and the slows help a lot keeping the healer merc's mana good. Apathy is hard to beat when pet tanking.

Bear in mind though that I've never played or boxed a high level druid, so I might be selling them short.

I think it's going to be tough to beat a shaman as a compliment box to any melee centric class. Yes you will lose the ease of travel, escape and probably a little in the pulling department; but the buffs, slows and general utility of the shaman outweighs that IMHO. In the end though, it's all about what's important to you. To this day I still box a cleric when I do feel like boxing because merc healers are so crappy compared to a real cleric.

A huge improvement for merc healers would be a simple "merc guard here unless getting hit" command so it wouldn't run around stupidly. The vast majority of my problems with them come from them moving where they shouldn't.

Ok, I guess I brought this on myself... Now I need help getting my shaman hotkeys set up.

/pause 5, /assist mage
/pet attack
/pause 50?, /cast counterbias slow+hot target's target
/pause 50, /cast proc tiger, panther whatever its called now
/pause 50, /cast dot 1

That look good or what do you guys do? I could maybe make another hotkey that just loads on a few more dots or something since just 1 dot isn't going to add much. I just say pause 50 as a guess, I'd have to test the reuse time for each spell casting.

Maybe this:
/pause 50, /cast dot 2
/pause 50, /cast dot 3
/pause 50, /cast dot 4
/canni