On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Wayne Sheppard wrote:

>
> Thats funny. My friends and I have been planning to test that very
> assertion. We wanted to make a group of Bard, Warrior, Ranger, and 3
> Paladins (pallies get better heals plus Lay Hands). We felt with 6 melee
> types, we could really do some serious damage. We would have had a great
> time thru the lower levels, but I could see possible problems at higher
> levels. By selectively taunting and backing out of combat, we could have
> spread the damage around quite well.

I've played this way a lot. It works great until you run into
the NPC corollary of the caster/melee imbalance - a caster
mob. Those will drop a group member before the others have
time to taunt it off him. For that reason, I'd recommend the
group have 2+ paladins minimum, or swap one tank for a cleric.

That's actually the typical group I play in - a cleric, bard,
and 4 tanks. Based on discussions I've been having on other
boards, apparently we take a really long time to kill stuff
(1-3 min vs 15 sec to 1 min) compared to other groups. Our
downtime is typically 0-30 seconds though. It is a lot of fun
IMHO compared to the 1-dimensional nuke it as fast as you can
approach. Small adjustments like which songs you play have
time to make a big difference.

At really high levels, like Harmonic says, melee starts to
become more important than the casters due to resists
(defensive casters like clerics aren't affected by this).
Unfortunately, that's due to there being different rules for
mobs vs. players which IMHO is always a bad thing.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...