Compared to Necro, how well can Shamans solo?

[tadkins]

I've often heard in class discussions, when folks are asking what the best class would be for someone that needs to solo a lot, needs to make frequent AFKs and such. And I hear necro and monk being mentioned most of the time due to their FD.

In other discussions I've heard of Shamans being one of the absolute best solo classes in the game as well, right up there with Enchanters, especially when they get Torpor.

I ask since I'm in a bind, trying to figure out what I want to play. I currently have decently geared characters on both Blue and Green; blue, a 31 mage, and green a 12 shaman. I want to play something evil because that's simply the way to go in this game and I'm debating between sticking it out with the Shaman, or whether someone like me should be playing a Necromancer instead, who does tend to solo a lot, does need to frequently AFK and wants the power to solo as much as he can.

[Falditin]

This question has been answered a few times before, but..

It depends on what you mean by solo. If you mean as in solo during the leveling process necro wins hands down. Necros can mow down mobs very quickly and easily. Necros can handle a lot of named camps quite well too, but there will be some camps that they can't solo that a shaman can do. freeti and 6 neck dragons come to mind.

Shaman is a priest and doesn't have a lot of dps, so they can't kill mobs as fast as a necro and shamans rely a ton on gear. L1-30 isn't bad if you have a Granite Face Grinder or Poison Wind Censer, but things will slow down as you level and mobs begin to hit harder. Early 50s picks up a little bit with JBB and epic would help a ton. Shaman dots aren't great until L49 and the shaman pet sucks at dps, but for it's level can take a beating.

As as a shaman if you can slow it, you can kill it. Just keep in mind that it may take a long time to kill it.

[Baler]

In Velious with some raid gear a shaman can solo a Gwurm.
I've soloed ayilish on my troll shaman on blue.

Oh you mean leveling. Root rot your way to 51, Then duo with a melee/tank/hybrid to 60.

If you really have to afk alot, you should stick with necro. FD is insane value for those situations. In comparable situations you'd have to log out on your shaman. The value of FD is that you can re-apply it if say you FD's next to a spawn point and come back with the mob standing there.

Long Term,.. the server is floaded with shaman in a not classic way. Unless you expect yourself to hit 60 and get torpor, I'd avoid it.

End Game the necro can do some things the shaman cant. I don't have a raid necro but there are videos of solo kills or solo fear fighting etc. If you can play your iksar necro to the fullest you'll be wowing people.

You're in the right ballpark for min-max meta soloing,. Enchanter, Shaman, Necromancer.
They won't enable you to play well, just keep that in mind.

[Toxigen]

Necro unless you're going to the very end game and want to solo difficult mobs.

[DMN]

I agree with the necro call from reading your post. The ability to hold a camp and AFK almost 100% in safety is pretty difficult to beat if one intends to be AFK often. Also doesn't look like you have the resources to properly twink out shaman so you soloing is going to be in the mediocre range until 60... and then I hope you got the 80-100k for torpor.

[tadkins]

Appreciate the answers everyone. Looks like Iksar Necro is my path. :)

[Bardp1999]

Necro is far and away a better soloer, but with Torpor and Slow a shaman can take down certain more difficult mobs (named camps ect). Both are excellent, and the duo of a shaman and necro is one of my favorites. Shaman/Necro/Monk might be my most favorite group (of any size) in the entire game.

For further clarification - shamans are terrible soloers until they get thier epic (very mana intensive) - necromancers with Charm or even fear kiting are on an entire different level

[Tethler]

Necro is far and away a better soloer, but with Torpor and Slow a shaman can take down certain more difficult mobs (named camps ect). Both are excellent, and the duo of a shaman and necro is one of my favorites. Shaman/Necro/Monk might be my most favorite group (of any size) in the entire game.

For further clarification - shamans are terrible soloers until they get thier epic (very mana intensive) - necromancers with Charm or even fear kiting are on an entire different level

Agree with this. I leveled my necro as a duo with my brother's shaman. Excellent synergy.

[Naethyn]

Shaman + Necro top tier buds.

[greenspectre]

Third'ed on Shaman + Necro power. Necro Heal-over-time keeps you topped up on Canni Fuel, and Shaman regen keeps them topped up on lich fuel. Dots plus pets plus fear in open areas or slow in closed areas is the general strategy. Toss in a JBB for additional nuke damage if you're spicy.

I've even been in groups as a shaman where me plus a necro kept the group healed without any issues. And shaman soloing isn't terrible with a JBB. Looking forward to experiencing how much better it gets with my epic, though!

[Toxigen]

Third'ed on Shaman + Necro power. Necro Heal-over-time keeps you topped up on Canni Fuel, and Shaman regen keeps them topped up on lich fuel. Dots plus pets plus fear in open areas or slow in closed areas is the general strategy. Toss in a JBB for additional nuke damage if you're spicy.

With a shaman for backup that necro will be an absolute machine charming undead.

Start in Kaesora at 34 w/ Beguile Undead and you'll never cast fear again.

I suppose you could do some snare / fear / root stuff in Paw or CT for the sweet ZEM...but once you get to CoM, KC, and HS I just don't see anything but charming undead as the META.

You can make a dungeon powerhouse trio adding enc, monk, or bard.

[RecondoJoe]

I would never argue that Shaman is better at solo'ing than Necros, but I leveled a Shaman to 50 on Green before Kunark came out and one of the necromancer friends I had who closely observed me re-rolled Shaman because he realized I can solo a lot of the same stuff he can, but I can also join a group and heal... it's like you get the best of both worlds...

now this was pre-fungi tunic, pre-torpor etc, so shamans weren't as powerful

i noticed some major differences from a shaman's perspective though
my necromancer friend at level 50 could go into Sol B or Guk and solo just about anything

my Shaman could not do this... at 50 you dont have enough mana to cast your level 49 DoTs a bunch of times, and your pet doesnt stand up to mobs... no lull, no FD etc. made it harder to deal with camps that had a lot of mobs.

but for leveling, and for farming guards for plat and stuff like that, Shaman was good enough to be optimal, and I still got a ton of invites for groups considering Shamans have slows, heals, buffs etc.
having that option to start or join a group at any time is really nice, because playing a game like EQ alone 24/7 gets super tiresome... Necro just feels weird to me too... like they feel so non gear dependent that getting upgrades doesn't feel as meaningful or rewarding as it does on other classes, lol

[busted]

In Velious with some raid gear a shaman can solo a Gwurm.

I'd love to see a video of this. Otherwise FAKE NEWS =)

[mcoy]

I'd love to see a video of this. Otherwise FAKE NEWS =)

Probably similar to:

5fsvt1xfuqY

-Mcoy

[busted]

Shamwowi show us a video of you soloing Gwurms please.

Thanks mate!

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Shamwowi show us a video of you soloing Gwurms please.

Thanks mate!

Lol that does sound like fun. I haven't attempted it yet, but I can do some test battles when I get some free time. I have heard of Shamans doing it before, but I haven't seen it happen.

EDIT: Wiki says they summon. I haven't done GWurms with a group in years, but I believe it. If that is the case, you couldn't do the strategy with the Ice Burrowers. That only works because Ice Burrowers do not summon. However, GWurms do not have the nasty high damage and dispel proc that Ice Burrowers do, so face tanking them may be doable. GWurms are also lower level than Ice Burrowers, so spells should be easier to land on them.

[greenspectre]

Lol that does sound like fun. I haven't attempted it yet, but I can do some test battles when I get some free time. I have heard of Shamans doing it before, but I haven't seen it happen.

EDIT: Wiki says they summon. I haven't done GWurms with a group in years, but I believe it. If that is the case, you couldn't do the strategy with the Ice Burrowers. That only works because Ice Burrowers do not summon. However, GWurms do not have the nasty high damage and dispel proc that Ice Burrowers do, so face tanking them may be doable. GWurms are also lower level than Ice Burrowers, so spells should be easier to land on them.

This considered, should be similar to cliff golems then? Your video on that was pretty thorough.

[enjchanter]

shamans can solo most stuff as long as you have like 45 minutes to 3 hours to kill it

[bomaroast]

Shamans have to click a lot more buttons, if that matters to you.

[Byrjun]

This considered, should be similar to cliff golems then? Your video on that was pretty thorough.

Kind of a rough comparison since guardian wurms do at least twice as much dps as a cliff golem.

The thing with shamans is that there's a certain amount of DPS that you can take that allows you to sustain the fight essentially forever, but once you go above that threshold then you won't be able to keep up anymore with Torpor.

On live I don't think I was able to solo guardian wurms until PoP. I doubt a shaman could solo one on P99 but with all the gear some people have on Blue... maybe?

[busted]

On live I don't think I was able to solo guardian wurms until PoP. I doubt a shaman could solo one on P99 but with all the gear some people have on Blue... maybe?


I don't think it's possible either. Gwurms hit for max 554 and I don't think torpor can outpace this level of beating.

I'd love to see this though!

We need a beefy best in slot shammy to give it the ol' college try.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Did a bit of testing tonight. Don't think a Shaman can solo GWurms. They just hit too hard. Their ability to double attack for 500 is just too much for Torpor to handle, even with Turgurs Insects applied.

[Danth]

I did those once duo with the wife (Shaman/SK) and they seemed more trouble than they were worth. I used some heal clicks so as to cover damage spikes since Torpor has a finite amount of health it can out-heal and chloroblast doesn't heal for a ton. Solo you'll pretty much want to have a bag (maybe more) of wort potions or something similar. You can probably win eventually but it likely won't be profitable unless you have good luck with spell drops.

Guess it bears remembering there's a difference between "trophy kill" solo'ing and every-day standard solo'ing.

Danth

[rustyfingers]

Right now, i level a necro, ench, sk and a sham in parallel ( i go by example from 25 to 33 with one char and level next char )
I have already done the necro, enc, SK and right now I am in the process of bringing the sham to 33 , he is 27 atm .
I uses the same spot for all the 4 classes, mobs are not social and warrior type. the shaman is by far the most painfull to level . He is not really twinked, as the other chars, he uses a PWC as weapon. Even with max 2HB skill for his level, he misses a lot, takes quite a beating from mob, and between the spell fizlle, interupt and debuff resist, its quite a PITA.
Between and necro and sham, for levelling at that level at least, the necro is 20 times better, the enc and sk are pretty good with their own set of tools.
Im gonna stick with the shaman leveling but its far to be fun.

I will add that forthesham , you have Canni and regen at 24 but the ratio mana gained/ HP lost is really bad. For the necro , you can leech and remove HP not from yourself but from the mob to regen , which is obviously 10 times better
Forthe sham, the downtime between hp regen from canni and the spells you have to recast on yourself like dex, str, agi, and regen, is just really bad, compared to necro/

[Baler]

Did a bit of testing tonight. Don't think a Shaman can solo GWurms. They just hit too hard. Their ability to double attack for 500 is just too much for Torpor to handle, even with Turgurs Insects applied.

wrong again, shaman can solo Gwurms and race won't matter.

Stop giving people awful shaman advice just because you can't play the class to it's fullest potential.
I don't even believe you have solo'd ayillish (https://wiki.project1999.com/Ayillish), which is easier than Gwurm.

For anyone wondering, Ayillish can be solo'd by a torpor shaman without clickies.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

wrong again, shaman can solo Gwurms and race won't matter.

Stop giving people awful shaman advice just because you can't play the class to it's fullest potential.
I don't even believe you have solo'd ayillish (https://wiki.project1999.com/Ayillish), which is easier than Gwurm.

For anyone wondering, Ayillish can be solo'd by a torpor shaman without clickies.

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed:) I just did some testing and reported my results. It was only an hour or two lol. I never claimed my opinion to be the end all be all of the discussion. So far, no one has come back and told me otherwise, or how they soloed a GWurm.

Would you mind actually showing us how you soloed a GWurm, instead of just bashing other people for no reason? I am not sure why you are doubting I have soloed Ayillish before, but you have just as little proof of the feat as I do. So again, maybe show your work:)

Edit: For a bit of clarification, I don't use clickies at all, such as puppet strings, wort pots, etc. Too lazy to recharge and fund them. So when I say "can't be soloed", I usually mean it in that context. I apologize for not making that distinction. I prefer to push the limits of what a Shaman can do with just their existing toolkit.

[mattydef]

Soloing a Gwurm on a shaman can be done, but you're gonna have a bad day if you get some resists.

[Jimjam]

Just rope some 51+ warrior in to eating a few hits with disc while you do the majority of the work.