Necromancers Versus Magicians As Soloers
 

Some of you may remember my thread earlier about shamen versus druids, in which I was trying to decide which to play. This isn't that; I'm just curious here because of something I've been hearing.

Essentially, I hear all the time about how overpowered mages are, how fast they solo, how much damage they do in groups, and so on. Yet I don't hear this nearly as much about necromancers. Yet, let's look at the facts. As I understand it, the way high level mages take down monsters is they buff the pet, send the pet at it, and maybe nuke it once or twice. If the monster is tough, they'll chain summon the pet.

Let's now look at the necromancer. The necromancer is also capable of chain summoning, and he also has at his disposal dots, lifesteal, hit point to mana conversion, snare, fear, and feign death (I may have forgotten something, but this list is pretty impressive as is). But mages are the ones that are overpowered?

The only way I can see this being the case would be if mage pets were leaps and bounds better than necro pets. And I'm willing to accept this, but I'd like some discussion on it. I know that mages get the nice damage shield on the fire pet (though necros get dots...) and the nice root on the earth pet (though necros have root and snare...). The real breaking point would have to be pet levels or stats; if mages are really so much more overpowered than necros, their pets must have far better stats and/or be far higher leveled than necro pets. Is this the case?

By the way, I'm a bit confused about the effects of weapons on mobs and pets. Mobs don't seem to be at all affected by the weapon they're wielding; an orc centurion (say) wielding nothing, a cracked staff, or a rusty dagger appears to do the same amount of damage and have the same amount of delay (correct me if I'm wrong; I've seen mobs do huge damage with rusty daggers, which is pretty perplexing). What about pets? I've heard varying things, and I might be misremembering, but the two situations I've heard described are that either 1) pets take on only the delay of their weapon but are unaffected by the damage, so low delay weapons make them super-powerful, or 2) pets take on both the damage and delay of their weapon. How do monster and pet weapons work?

HERP.

Mage pets hit harder, have more hitpoints, better mitigation, better avoidance and (I believe) higher levels.

You want to discuss which class is easier to solo?

This is classic server but the majority of people seem to gravitate to the solo classes. Kinda the reverse of what I thought it'd be like.

I'm actually getting quickly disenchanted with classic's glaring class balance problems. Please kunark, please be soon.

Last I heard it was going to be live in 20 minutes.

With all due respect, and despite my agreeing with your pro-grouping principles, you're kind of derailing the thread. I solo and group on different characters, and like I said at the beginning of the post, this is just something I'm curious about, not something I'm using to choose a class to play. And the question is not about ease of soloing but effectiveness. So what are you saying, if this comment is not completely irrelevant to the thread? That I shouldn't even be discussing which class is the better soloer because I should always be grouping no matter what?

No, nothing like that. What I'm saying is that you'll be running around in circles trying to pick the compare and contrast two different solo classes. Especially when they'll change as expansions get released.

Threads like this tend to focus in on one of the other classes being identified as the 'best'.

The other part is that there are already topics which covered this in detail.

http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...cros+magicians

http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...cros+magicians

I've actually read both threads before, a while ago, but they were hazy in my mind and I remembered them being not really that definitive and not addressing the specific questions I was interested in. But I'll give them another read through.

Here's the summary of why people complain about Mages but not Necros...

The fire pet gets a higher damage shield than the Mage can cast and the level 20 pet basically has a level 49 damage shield on it. To offset this the fire pet is supposed to be unable to tank as well. Unfortunately the fire pet basically tanks as well as a player tank can but has increased regen as well.

This means Mages can essentially summon a tank partner that gets a high level DS and regen by default meaning they're basically power leveling themselves. This isn't how it was in classic at all. The fire pet got its ass kicked much faster to balance out the damage shield it has.

Something is wrong with the way pets take damage. Another good example of this is watching my girlfriend use the level 8 Necro pet on her SK in upper guk and it was a GREAT off tank for blue/even con mobs to us at level 20. I mean this thing literally took damage as well as she did... the level 8 Necro pet.. on level 18-20 mobs.

Of course the Necro pet doesn't get a damage shield and therein lies the reason why people complain about Mages and not Necros. Both of them have ridiculously overpowered pets at the moment in terms of tanking ability but Mages get that huge DS component too.