Originally Posted by Lune
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If you think monk/shaman is even comparable, then you've never done Ench/Shaman the right way. It's an entirely different dynamic, like a machine gun vs. a musket. You do not heal pets.
I leveled my shaman from 1-60 duoing with my brother's enchanter. I've leveled a monk 1-50 with fungi/CoF/etc duoing with my brother's shaman.
Twink monk/shaman is obviously way better into the 20's, but who cares about those levels? Many, many duo's are great when you're noobs. What you want to focus on here is the fact that with monk/sham you're limited by the monk's dps. Your duo can never kill faster than the monk can kill. You have very limited tools for dealing with casting and healing mobs, which are present in most of the game's highest ZEM areas.
With an enchanter/shaman, your killing rate is limited only by the mana cost of maintaining charm/clump clockwork, which I'll describe in a min. We leveled in places like Sol A, Sol B, MM castle, Guk CoM (back when the server was less crowded), by pulling packs of 5-8 mobs. Me (Shaman) would pull them around a corner and my brother (enchanter) would drop an AoE mez on them. We would then both cycle through and root every mob into a large clump. Ench then charms a mob, the pack beats the shit out of it, break charm w/ gazughi ring at low hp, charm another, use it to finish off mob, rinse repeat until the pack is dead. The shaman maintains roots and finishes off mobs as necessary, the enchanter just charms and interrupts casts as necessary. During the brief period when paralyzing earth is available to the ench but not the shaman, you shift duties as required. In order to avoid spell barrages from our clump while switching charms, sometimes I'd gazughi ring him about .5 sec before he finished the next charm cast.
The shaman is fueled by both canni and clarity. The enchanter has regen to mitigate any nicks and bruises that make it past rune. If you're killing appropriate level mobs in this way, the mana cost is low enough that downtime is minimal or nonexistent. You can vary the pack size depending on how much it costs you to maintain the packs so that you have no downtime. Even a pack of 3 mobs beating on your charm pet is going to out-dps a monk. After level 40, it's very important that you generate more dps than a monk is capable of, because mob HP gets so ridiculous. If you move away from clumping, a charmed/hasted/armed pet is still going to do a lot more damage than a monk, and the presence of an enchanter is going to make it way easier to deal with casters, adds, and difficult rooms.
Once you get into the 50's, enchanter/shaman is vastly superior at handling content like Sebilis / Howling Stones where mobs have a ton of hp, there are nasty casters, and you can get charm pets pushing out over a 100dps. A shaman by itself can solo a camp like LCY or RCY by clumping mobs and dotting them down with his epic. What happens when you also have an enchanter charming members of the clump and having the rest of the clump beat it down? You get something way better than monk/sham.
The only thing I liked better about monk/sham was the fact that it was far more relaxing, low-effort, and straightforward. That's also why I emphasized that ench/sham is only better than monk/sham if you know what you are doing.
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