Best 4 person all caster/priest group

[Danth]

Originally Posted by DeathsSilkyMist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

but the stuff Troxx posted shows pretty low DPS for a Mage to be honest.

Not really. The overwhelming majority of players over-rate their own damage dealt and typcially only look at or post cherry-picked best-case-scenario parses. Troxx has always been pretty good about trying to keep things grounded to reality. I think you know this, even if you're coming at it from the opposite direction, because you already know the shaman's a better offensive class than most folks fully appreciate.

As for the shaman, your example I expect represents using dual Bane of Nife plus an Envenomed Bolt to get into the mid 90's. That's near 1200 mana per two mobs, for ~45-50 second-odd duration spells, and since it takes a little longer to recover that much mana, plus the offensive spell cast times, you need mobs that are dying at just the right rate then slight gaps between the next pulls if you want to sustain that output. It does not permit the shaman much leeway for using malo (another 350 mana per) or his own slow. Granted Mala costs just as much mana and the magician can't recover mana as quickly as a shaman can so it hurts the magician's mana bar even more.

That's where your opponents are going to pile on: It's doable, but it requires fairly specific circumstances that the group in question has to deliberately maintain while also managing a couple of charm pets and other pulls. The magician achieves effectively its full potential in a brain-dead manner that requires no planning or thought, so in practice it'll tend to reach that level more consistently. But as has been said, I'll prefer the shaman between those two anyway, outside a specific handful of areas, simply because in a group that's already ripping everything to shreds the extra defense offered by the shaman counts for more than a slightly increased killspeed that nobody's even going to notice anyway.

Danth