cjhsb wrote:Wouldn't work I'm afraid by the looks of it. Firstly the range of the AOE is too pitifully small; secondly you'd need a tank on every mob taunting to keep aggro off the mages - 2 hits at even mid-level and thats a dead mage. Unless you had a large ratio of tanks v casters in the group, I can't see the practical application....and even then you'd be AOEing heals then anyhow as the mage.
Actually this isn't how it works - What you aim for is speed. Take for example that you can put say Acid5 on an AoE, and there's 6 of you. You then find a critter which takes 5-6 Acid5 DDs to die, and tends to lurk in groups (close nit ones by preference). The leader targets the one in the middle so that the AE will hit as many as possible, everyone "assists" to grab their target and then does a countdown, so that everyone launches their ACID5 AoE spell at once.
For the more paranoid, the 6th person picks the critter closer to the party than the one the others are targetting, though naturally the aim is not to hit any critter that wouldn't have already taken hits from the others. Any critters that run at you should be heavily damaged at this point and so can be tidied up with straight DDs.
You then move on to the next group of critters.
The idea is speed - Rather than killing 1 big gribbly that will earn enough exp that its worth grouping up for, you kill several slightly wimpy critters in what is (as far as each individual is concerned) one or maybe 2 casts. There's no need for warriors to taunt or any other form of crowd control as you're using the most successful status effect - they're all dead.
The down-side is, of course, the requirement that *everyone* be mature, organised and willing to be effectively part of "the machine" that is the group, oh and the leader is clear and good at identifying issues...
Oh, and it doesn't really work on social groups unless the number of those that are pulled due to proximity of damage is probably less than half the number of people in the party, since at that time you can do the buddy systerm (one holds, one nukes)