Shooting Myself in the Foot if I Don't Make a Tank?

[Carto]

I am playing on the horde side and currently have a mid-40s priest. I had been boxing a mage but stopped at 20 because I ended up doing some dungeons with guildies and quite frankly I just got behind. My plan @ 60 is to boost four characters up so I can have a viable 5-man team using ISboxer. As I am no expert at multiboxing WoW (I have boxed in Everquest for years though), I am hoping to get some advice from the pros!

While it is quite clear that warriors are just absolutely massive damage - especially once they get ravager - I like the utility of mages and warlocks and I am willing to sacrifice top DPS to get it. With priest as my main, I have toyed around with running the following teams:

1) priest/warrior/3x mage
2) priest/warrior/2x mage/lock
3) priest/4x mage
4) priest/3x mage/lock
5) priest/4x lock
6) priest/3x lock/mage

I am torn because playing all casters would be easier in my opinion and great for gold farming in the open world, but my hands would be tied as far as level 60 dungeons are concerned. It would be nice to at least have the option of running dungeons if there is a certain pieec of gear I am after.

Long story short, any general advice you guys can give as to some of the pros/cons, aside from the obvious ability to do dungeons solo with a warrior? Between combo #1 and #2, does playing 3x mages vs. 2x mages/1 lock really complicate things much more given that I'd be controlling four separate classes?

Thanks in advance!

Cartos

[Twl231]

How do you boost lower level characters?

Other posters have commented that 4 warriors and a Shammy is the best farming group power wise for end game, with 1 Warrior and 3 Mages at 2nd. I can tell you from experience with a mixed comp, it can be very complicated because the classes all have different spells with different cast times. However, what you lose in kill speed you make up for in utility. For instance, with my WPMLS I can reset a dungeon and start again in 1 min with all hearths on CD. Make my Mage leader, port the mage to Org, log out the other 4 toons to the character selection screen, reset dungeon, log 4 toons back in, they reset at the beginning of the instance, and walk outside and summon the mage back with my lock.

[nodoze]

Likely one of the following would be optimal for grinding Dungeons in a traditional "Trinity" manner with the DPS and Healer protected because they are at range:

priest/Paladin/2x mage/lock (or go Warrior if Horde)
priest/Paladin/3x mage (or go Warrior if Horde)

Regarding your question of swapping one mage in a 3 Mage DPS team to a Warlock I would read the folloiwng:

https://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/56070-5-Man-Caster-Comp?p=422537&viewfull=1#post422537

Some teams are reporting great success from the following team composition (at least into their 40s so far):

5) priest/4x lock

The following is a link to one of them in action at 40 so you can get an idea of the play-style:

https://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/56023-How-s-Everyone-Progressing-so-Far-and-What-s-Your-Group-Comp/page3?p=422449#post422449

[Mercbeast]

Warriors are pretty slow until they get whirlwind. They just don't really have any real AOE until then. So you're never going to reliably, or efficiently deal with packs > 2 until 36, and then packs > 4 after whirlwind.

Ravager of course gives you a whirlwind with no hit cap, but, its a proc, so fundamentally unreliable. HOWEVER...

With the way hit chance/damage scales based on level, you can create scenarios with ravager, when you're fighting predominantly green con monsters. Why? You can pull huge packs of dungeon elites that are green and have far more survivability. Then ravager procs, and vroom vroom. You can be ghetto mages in a way.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

My take on it is that you have a sliding scale of content difficulty you can complete, where the upper bounds are limited by the tank's tankiness, the healer's output and mana regen, the DPS output, etc. For example, if you have 5x DPS (like a 5-hunter or 5-warlock team in retail) then you can burn some things down before they eat the pets, and the limit on the things you can burn down is usually limited by gear. So you don't necessarily *need* a tank, but it does help make survivability in some situations go up quite a bit due to the incoming damage mitigation and threat management that tank specs bring.