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Discussion - 6 box mages (1 Viewer)

Joined
Mar 24, 2018
RedCents
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Anyone ever try this? :) I am new to this forum so plan to participate in more useful posts a bit later but for now I thought I'd share my bit of experience doing this. I have boxed many different types of groups, but I often see people suggesting 6 box mages for the lolz of it, and after so many years, I decided to give it a shot last year to see if it would work.

I didn't do any power levelling or twinking, I just played them as a group from level 1 and all I was using was key broadcasting. I would send the 6 pets, and all would cast a nuke. For the first 50 or so levels, every mob died in 2 seconds. Pets would arrive at the mob, and the 6 big nukes would arrive a second later and the mob was dead. It felt pretty ridiculous. At around 60 ish, things changed and the mobs got tougher and ahead of the curve, so 6 nukes would not kill them. I think a second cast (so 12 nukes landing), would kill most things, but this meant that the pets had to actually do some tanking now. By level 70 ish, this was becoming a problem. I had originally been using 6 fire pets or 6 water pets just for the dps, but now there were pets dying regularly, so I was forced to tweak things a bit. I now had one mage running an earth pet with taunt enabled, and that character had pet heal and pet armor buff, and the others all stayed pure dps. This worked well for a while longer.

At about level 75 I tried some HAs and things started going wrong. In HA's, with no way to split pull, I ended up having to fight groups of 3 mobs. They would rip the pets to shreds and the nukes were not doing much damage anymore so even 6 of them felt like it barely scratched. I would have to cast at least 12 but more like 18 to take a mob down, maybe even more... In this time, the poor Earth pet had been thoroughly molested, and the other pets were dropping like flies because the Earth pet couldn't hold aggro on multiple mobs. The other issue is that the aggro had become a problem in general, even against 1 mob, the Earth pet was struggling to survive, with the instant heal being spammed, and the promised heal helping but still not really cutting it, the only way to not lose the pet was to spam nukes as fast as possible. But with spamming the nukes, one of the mages would always end up with aggro. A dead mage or two would really ruin the fun, and if I didn't spam the nukes, the Earth pet would eventually die and then it would wipe out all the other pets or just the mages themselves moments later. With a pull of 2 or 3 this was happening a lot.

The worst thing was that not only could I not split pull in any way, but when a mage died, I had no rez either. So I had a lot of tedious runs back to the HA from PoK. I decided to give up on HA's and just go back to killing mobs that I could pull a bit better, and I made some good progress again. I also got a pet enhancement item for the Earth pet which helped too. But by 85 ish, things were just becoming too dangerous, and I was really missing not being able to fight nameds. I ended up swapping out 1 mage for a Bard. I didn't like doing this because it was kind of cheating... but I was curious to see what difference it would make. I now could get a single mob every time, it made downtime a lot better, and bigger nukes. But aggro was as big a problem as ever, even against a single mob, the tank pet struggled to stay alive and the mages struggled to kill the mob before it killed the pet. I then thought if I could just have a healer.... The healer could easily keep the tank pet alive and then the 4 mages could whoop the mob. But at that point it isn't the 6 mage group anymore, so I may as well just add a real tank, and an evac class, and have a well rounded traditional group that can go anywhere and do anything. So I went back to doing that.

So I failed, not that I really care, I enjoyed checking it out and I enjoy my traditional group more because I mostly like to do tough nameds in tough places and nothing really beats having a 'proper' group for stuff like that. However I think the 6 mage group could work further if it was tweaked more and I gave it more time. I think if I struggled through that slump, the higher level mages are ahead of the curve and the Earth pet would have been a good enough tank, the heals would be better, AAs would make a big difference, and the nukes would be bigger too. Also if I spent the time to get a good enhancement item on all the pets, that would make a big difference too. I may try again some day, although I guess that 3 mages with appropriate mercs would probably always work out much better.
 
I think you got the best of it, the 6 box mage group is primarily used for lvls 1-50 (specifically TLP servers). Check out Corinav you'll probably see tons of mage groups runnin around :toot:
 
I used to solo reds with my lowbie mage by using a method of summoning a pet and then reclaiming the current one right before it finished casting. If it finished casting and you still had a pet up the spell does nothing, but if you reclaim right before it finishes you have a 100% health pet to send back into the fight. It was by far the fastest solo exp. I wonder if that's doable with a 6 box mage setup.... it would be more complicated to key broadcast, but might increase survivability.

Also, isn't there a spell where nuke damage heals surrounding pets? Once you get that it seems like the nukes should help keep the pets up.
 
Wow nice! I bet that could work but yeah, it would be tricky. I thought it was kinda funny though seeing the entire concept break down in the higher levels. Like when I dropped one mage for the bard, suddenly pulling was great. Then I thought if I dropped one more mage for a healer, the tank pet would survive anything. And then I thought hmm well I could just drop one more for a real tank because they get AE taunts and that would be best. And before you know it you have a normal group :P

But it was a fun experiment. And yeah I bet 1-50 on progression servers would be... a blast :P I was surprised by how much it trivialized those old levels. Most mobs just went splat with 6 nukes.
 
Wow nice! I bet that could work but yeah, it would be tricky. I thought it was kinda funny though seeing the entire concept break down in the higher levels. Like when I dropped one mage for the bard, suddenly pulling was great. Then I thought if I dropped one more mage for a healer, the tank pet would survive anything. And then I thought hmm well I could just drop one more for a real tank because they get AE taunts and that would be best. And before you know it you have a normal group :P

But it was a fun experiment. And yeah I bet 1-50 on progression servers would be... a blast :P I was surprised by how much it trivialized those old levels. Most mobs just went splat with 6 nukes.

But with a bard you should only be getting singles (theoretically), so AE taunt is no problem! The exception to that would be if you tried to do higher level progression missions where linked mobs are involved or mobs spawn on top of the group. THEN you'd have issues.

I was thinking just dropping one mage and adding a merc (or druid, or shaman) would work well. I would vote shaman for slow, although if stuff dies as fast as you say then it's not necessary. Great perk about druids is they still get a pet (so still an all pet group!) and they can port. If I recall, too, they get some pretty nifty debuffs for nukes, right?
 
Hey shammy get a pet too, better than those dumb druid pets!

Yea, I was going back and forth about whether to recommend a shammy or druid, but the druid might help him out more. The shaman is great for slows and HoTs, but the ports and extra nuke debuffs on the druid might push it over the edge. Can't really go wrong either way, though.

Now what he should REALLY do is swap one mage out for a necro (dots, FD splitting, pet, REZ) and see if that helps.
 
You can actually stay with the pet tanking it just has a few rough points, if you really want an evac you could make it so your healer is a druid (then you have skin to vines/sumac or what not)
 
Discussion - 6 box mages

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