Just wondering - would you rather have bard / bst or bard / shaman for adps / monk support? - dps - adps - cc / debuffs Who wins? bard / bst or bard / shaman?
Outside of a 6 monk group? Shaman. Inside, do yourself a favor and go 4 monks, Bard, and shaman. Have fun FD ing tanking duties between each monk
I'm confused, why do you say bard twice? Is the bard with a bst a different bard than the one with a shaman or are you just comparing bst and shaman here?
I'm guessing you're building a six box team built around your monk and are trying to decide whether bst or sha is better for a last slot. It'd be definitive if I knew what the other slots were, but it's probably going to be a shaman.
Nah really just considering the last slot in this group: monk, paladin, cleric, bard, mage. Lacking some CC although have a back up tank built in and the monk is a solid off tank also. Wanting to progress through the Heroic AAs with a solid team capable of handling a variety of encounters. Not worried about having an optimal group - I like the utility of being able to handle just about anything that will be thrown at me without using game altering programs. Also the monk is about 45-50% of the groups dps and is the engine of my group.
With a cle/pal/brd in the group, a shaman's healing is a bit overkill. The beastlord will probably boost your monk's DPS the most, but it won't be game-changing boost. It'll also help your mage pet, bard and paladin, but so will the ADPS from the shaman. It's hard to get a lot of utility from a 6th character if you're not using third party programs, especially if you're not try-harding. In some cases you'll get more realized DPS with a healer merc that frees you up to spend more time on your mage/monk and less on your pal/cleric, or allows you to use 2H on your pal instead of 1h/shield. But if you rolled up a bst, you could do just fine by popping over to them and hitting a few macros that pop some ADPS, send your pet in, cast your DoT's and use your abilities.
For that group I'd go bst over shm - you don't really need more healing and having a 3rd DPS for burn situations can make some encounters much much easier (ie Velk's mission in ToV). Generally speaking more DPS makes everything easier, and a pally+cleric should be able to handle group healing just fine. Only thing about bst is that it'll lose a lot of efficiency if it's an alt-tab box because they need to constantly be casting something. Shaman can get really busy too though, I would only recommend shaman if you're okay with a character not offering too much in favor of being easier to box. Can't really speak to who is better adps for a monk, I have a team with all 4 (monk+bard+shaman+bst), but I do know that bst is huge for pally DPS (especially vs undead). My pally's DPS took off like a rocket when I swapped out a berserker for beastlord in my main team. I can also say that in my monk team, the beastlord regularly outdps's the monk on both sustain and burn unless I'm being really diligent about monk discs/AAs, but that's with key broadcasting.
Wow ok thank you. My bst isn't doing that much DPS yet but she's only 111 with auto grant AA. I have a feeling a bst requires a lot of AA to get good.
Fresh auto-grant only characters are pretty weak. If it means anything, my pal/brd/shm/mnk/rng/bst group more than doubled in DPS from fresh 110 to 110 with 6-7k AAs. No gear changed during that time either. Part of that was learning how to play the classes better, organize CD usage, etc., but the majority was AAs. I think synergies were the biggest amplifier. If you can get everyone in the team to melee full time (probably very annoying with alt-tab) it can add a lot of extra DPS. For reference, in my main team (war/brd/shm/rog/bst/pal), the rogue synergy alone adds about 120k dps between 6 characters + 2 pets proc'ing it. It's a bit harder to measure some of the other synergies like monk or bst but I wouldn't be surprised if they were also pretty beefy, and the bard one is a flat benefit no matter what class is melee'ing. That might not be worth it with alt-tab but I still think the extra DPS of the bst makes for a better overall group. Your burn potential would be way higher which can go a pretty long way.
Thanks for the tips and advice. By the way I do use a key broadcaster just not the software that gives you abilities you wouldn't otherwise have or other shenanigans.
Either a beastlord or a berserker will boost your DPS. Overall a berserker will boost your group's DPS more than adding a beastlord, but a beastlord will increase the monk's DPS more. Your monk shouldn't be doing 45% of your group's DPS. There's no reason to delay adding a sixth (whatever you choose), but you'll want to spend some time examining your mage, paladin and bard's DPS.
I've been wondering about this for quite a while now, berserkers seem to be very popular but I wasn't very impressed with mine. When I swapped out my berserker for beastlord in my main group, I want to say the overall group's DPS increased by around 20-30%, which is monstrous for a single DPS->DPS class swap. I've been thinking about a rough group boxing class tier list lately, having tried everything except mage and necro, and beastlord is the only DPS I'd put at S-tier. Berserker was more like a B-tier though it's quite possible I was doing something wrong. I suspect I'll need to run more experiments myself to really figure it out.
Same here however I used to raid on a Berserker for a bit and did quite well so I'm left scratching my head on why a typical lesson session is alot less desired and even some all out burns, I'm embarrased to post them lol. Use my 20 year mained bard as ADPS, have a warrior tank, mage for CoH(but outparses almost the whole group), and 2 zerks with cleric. Contemplating two scenarios, drop the mage for a Beastlord for Dicho and Fury hopefully upping both sustained and big burns OR dropping the zerks in favor for two rogues whom seem pretty straight forward on how to optimize...maybe possibly with the rogue scenario dropping the mage for a beastlord as well. I've hit a 1.3mill parse on Cacti but seems like it should be more. Yup using same software as Tucoh.
Well my monk is in raid gear now with almost all of her DPS AA (I'm missing like ambidex for which I almost always use a 2hb and some ranks of Ton Po's). And I've played her so much on her own now that I have a better feel for her than any of my other toons. I also played her as a main way back before I returned to Live. While my bst is level 111 and I think the last time I parsed her she was level 109 with really no AA above the auto grant. That said I'm doing some organizing and going back through my toons to optimize them a bit since I haven't really done so for almost a year on most toons. The bst I just made in July so I had the most game knowledge going in when setting her up. Oh and I have spent time to optimize the monk. I have also gotten my mage to the point now where she is 2nd on DPS in my crew.
Dissident is on my bst's multibind and gets cast every time it's up. And my bst has constant mana issues. LOL.
Considering both my Dicho and Dissident are Rank I am I best sticking with Dissident or is the mana savings on Dicho worth using it without losing too many benefits from Dissident?
Dicho all day if you're struggling with mana Dicho 1 has 1: Increase Pet Chance to Flurry by 92% 3: Increase Chance to Flurry by 38% 4: Increase Pet Chance to Rampage by 25% 6: Decrease Weapon Delay by 33.8% those are the exact same on all ranks of Dicho, Dissident, and Composite If you went all the way from there to to Composite 6 (raid rank of the 115 ability) you'd get a whole extra 285 endurance return, 1221 more mana back, 4770 more healed. Not nothing, but at an increased cost of 3067. That cost is nothing if you use a Gift of Mana on it. And that cost is reduced by mana pres - if you have an evolver or raid ring, and a campfire/banner buff, then you save 2-32%, average 17%, for an expected increased cost of 2545. Less the increased mana return of 1221 for a net cost increase of 1324 per cast. One absolutely can value the increased endurance & group mana high enough to pay the extra, but that's what you're getting. One pays more mana to bolster the sustain of ... functionally speaking, of the ranger in one's group. Since they're very surely the only one using more resources in battle than the beastlord themselves.
fwiw, that's 1221 per minute, or 120/tick about. For scale, enchanter Sagacity buff is 188/tick. So if you pay for it, you are getting (for your group, not for yourself) 2/3 of an additional enc mana regen.
I run out of endurance faster than mana usually on both the monk and the bard. No ranger in my group. The only one struggling with mana issues severely is the beastlord. The bard does have some mana issues depending how often I use insult.
