Pretty much anything with a mage is the best at leveling. Mage would be hyper OP if it had any crowd control at all, so by adding any crowd control it becomes your best friend in a class.

I’ve found that pet classes are much better with the whole snare aggro or fear kiting strat as a rogue gets over chasing a mob around poking it while moving fairly quickly.

Mage/necro are awesome bc both have strong pets and if you get adds and pbaoe snare they both have PBaoes they can push out while pet kills.

As for necro/shaman, it’s super synergistic as not only does your mana directly Increase their efficiency but your HP regen is also converted to even more mana for them. Especially once you get cantaba at lvl 55. With a decent lute cantana + Nivs + double pulse is like 40+ hp regen per tic plus 14 mana per tic.... shaman or necro turn into unstoppable dot machines at that point.

You can also rely on tactics such as rooting multiple mobs on top of each other and then charming within the pile to get mega DPS, etc and as any bard worth his salt for big names etc you can help both by tash orbing, Fufils with drum for huge MR rebuffs to help for easy AF slow for shaman and to help necro fear or Mez or slow yourself at that point to deal with gates, CHs etc. Both classes are super synergistic.

If you go full out with rooting in the right spot (pull + mezz mobs on top of each other), bard AE dots can do a ton as well on top of the normal root rot of like 5 mobs. I used to do a lot of ez pz velks spiders like that.

Yea the more there are the more efficient those pbaoe dots become. Once you hit 57 though as a bard you can just pull 20-25 velk spiders at a time and pbaoe snare, cleric with donals boots best duo for that zone if you choose not to just solo it all. Alas no DN or velks on green for easy mode 55-60.

You can swarm bear pits too, I bet people would absolutely treasure that

Yeah but the rooting 4-5 (really the max in duo for efficiency of the rooter) is just so easy lol. No running around, no worrying about insta death, etc.

I would actually go an entire different avenue and suggest cleric.

Why?

A. Heal
B. Rez (no bard is perfect at swarming)
C. Clerics have Word Point Blank AoEs
(if timed is so much fun to see the lines of damage as a cleric)

Cleric having Donals boots is awesome too! Dont try to tell these ninja keyboard warrior bards they aren’t perfect!

Ended up going Bard/Druid! Pretty fun so far, I think it'll be a good time later, thanks for the suggestions all!

Druid is a great choice for a new player.

Have him port you guys around and see a bunch of zones on the way up.

Introduce him to charming animals and you guys can start really packing a punch. Highly recommend Cazic Thule gators for that sweet ZEM. Eventually can move on to chardok and bear pits for the 50-60 grind.

Great choice! Very versatile combination! Extremely Mobile! Y’all can make a zillion dollars PLing too.