A tale begins...one AOE mage and...?

[mjdoom]

I'm assuming that your comment about two mages and a warlock AoE killing elites was in reference to my statement that they can't.  I was addressing a mage and warlock pair, where you have a fuller group with a healer.  I'm not disagreeing with you and all, but that a mage/warlock twosome will die before the elites do.  Your scenario works well, and I'd love to do a two mage and a warlock setup in a party with a healer and a tank.  I felt the need to clarify that we were discussing two different things with the 'can't' and 'can' statments.  I agree with everything you said.

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Hmm, something got lost in translation. I wasn't actually referring to your comments at all, just adding some general information to the power of aoe when used properly.

If we are talking about a duo situation my comments are completely worthless. In those situations if you go mage/warlock you don't have a healer and it's very possible to die before you can aoe the mobs to death. This is most certainly true of elites and there may even be some non-elites that would make the situation very hairy (nothing specific comes to mind but it seems like this may well be true). In the duo situation it is strictly a battle to see who dies first.

I was referring more to a party setup like vor_lord mentioned where you can have healers to back up your aoeers. In this case aoe can be extremely powerful and can take out lots of mobs. The farthest into the game I've seen this tactic used effectively was to take out the dragonkin packs in Sunken Temple (our Pally might has well have not even been there).

On Stormrage our 6 members who climbed to 60 together happened to be Priest, Pally, Mage, Mage, Warlock, Hunter so we've had plenty of experience nuking while having our pally or even our hunter's dps pet tank for us. This allows you to take full advantage of crowd control and learn some of the devastation that mages and warlocks can cause when played well.

Vor_lord's comment about using a priest in shadowform to tank sounds like it could be fun. I would still speculate that some battles would be very difficult (like Archeus was mentioned) but it could at least be fun to try. This might be a specific case where you want your second priest to go all the way to Divine Spirit and have mages pop on that mage armor so that you can hopefully keep nuking for a longer time. If a shadowform priest can stand up to Archeus and the mages use burst damage to drop the adds (or even the VW tanks with one priest concentrating heals on it as noone else will be building hate toward Archeus) that fight might actually be winnable. One thing is for certain, when everyone goes "all on" Archeus when the elites wake up you will be able to mete out a lot of damage quickly in an attempt to drop him :)

Just as a point of reference, I have run with a 5 man group exactly as Vor_lord mentioned (Priest, Priest, Mage, Mage, Warlock) once before. But that was doing Princess runs when we were all 60 and we were able to easily drop her, the croc, the stone giant, and the goblin all in under a half hour.

- mjdoom

Edit: Didn't like the way I worded something