Duo + magician in trio advice

[Fishbait]

From personal experience, if you want to go a melee/heal class I would definitely say Monk/Shaman would be the way to go, mage with you would be icing on the cake for extra damage. My friend and I duo'd a Monk/Cleric fresh to the server to 35, but that started to take it's toll, not being able to slow mobs later on should not be under estimated. Also became mind numbingly boring.

Will re-iterate to choose a monk if you go the melee route, they are extremely inexpensive to gear, you could get by with only spending 500 platinum on gear for the first 40+ levels and the Shaman takes care of the haste/slow later on.

That said, we ended up rolling a Necro/Mage combo which has been very strong, the issue we eventually ran into is not if we can kill mobs, it's can we find a spot where we can chain pull mobs non-stop efficiently. Post 34 it has been a blur of xp, we have zero down time and constantly have a graveyard of mobs at our spot.

These characters also are extremely inexpensive to gear, we basically did 1-45 each wearing under 1k platinum worth of gear. This combo has a lot of diversity for pet tanking or fear kiting.

Grouping...eh, not the best characters to plug and play into any group situation, but to be honest, it's more hassle and less xp to form or join a group if you have a strong duo/trio.