Duos

Been thinking a bit about the best class combination for a duo to play. First thing that comes to mine is Warrior/Priest, which is wonderful, but unoriginal. So this got me thinking of what every group really need:

• DPS
• Damage reduction
• healing
• crowd control

So, the Warrior/Priest combo can do very well at three of these areas, but are week in crowd control (undead aside). What about other classes? Rather than using my brain I reference the Class page on Wowwiki and came up with the following (not taking into account talent builds):

• Druid
• Great Healing and Tanking
• Decent DPS
• Situational CC
• Hunter
• Great DPS and CC
• No Healing and limited Tanking
• Mage
• Great DPS and CC
• No Healing or ability to Tank
• Paladin
• Great Tanking
• Decent Healing
• Limited DPS and CC
• Priest
• Great Healing
• Capable DPS
  
• Situational CC and no Tanking.
• Rogue
• Great DPS
• Decent CC
• Limited Tanking and no Healing
  
• Shaman
• Decent DPS, Healing, and Tanking
• Limited CC
• Warlock
• Decent DPS
• Pet can Tank
• Situational CC
• No Healing
• Warrior
• Great DPS and Tanking
• No Healing or CC

Looking at the list above the only classes that are Decent or better in three areas are Druid and Shaman. Now other classes can compensate through talent builds for added strength in specific areas. For alliance I would look at substituting Hunter for Shaman as the Hunter has great DPS and CC and has a pet that can easily Tank if the Druid is Healing.

Should it be any coincidence that my wife and I just rolled a Shaman and Druid to play together?

L2Tank

Okay, so we ran Stockades a couple nights ago and I ended up bringing Daroul, my level 24 (at the time) Warrior. I don't think I've played him in several months and I've never used him to tank in a group. It was certainly a learning experience. I don't think I did bad job either. I was able to keep mobs on me 90% of the time and the only deaths we had came from unmanagable adds. We had one wipe from an accidental Psychic Scream, but we recovered well. Anoth thing that added to the general stress of the run was most people in the party were playing classes they were unfamiliar with in groups. A couple of mages who weren't sheeping adds (corrected halfway through, CC FTW), the priest was attempting to DPS rather than focus on healing (again corrected quickly), and just general carlessness. Both Dextren and Bazil were prox aggroed by someone other than me and I quite a few times I was unable to get Aggro on mobs before the mass DPS started. Not anything that was unusual, but certainly an educational experience. More later...