This has to be a bug, or else the memes about devs hating beastlords are actually true. Beastlords get Rank 1 of Feral Swipes at level 65 in the Gates of Discord expansion. It's a passive AA that gives the Round Kick ability a 100% chance to proc a 2nd Round Kick with 150% accuracy mod. The problem is, even with the Round Kick skill maxed out, this still does significantly less damage than just doing a regular Kick. Since Round Kick and Kick share a cooldown timer, using this AA is actually a DPS loss. Rank 2 becomes available in The Serpent Spine, level cap is increased to 75, and the skill caps of both Kick and Round Kick are increased. Once again, even with both kick skills maxed, regular old Kick is still more damage than getting a double round kick with accuracy bonus. I've seen others say this is not a bug, but I don't see how this could be working as intended. Why would you give us a damaging AA that is a damage loss to actually use it? Before anyone wants to @ me and say that in 20 expansions form now Round Kick will become better than Kick, that's irrelevant. In the era that you get the AA it is a loss. That's nice that in later expansions it's not bugged any more, but in earlier expansions it is.
I parsed it every new expansion on phinny (no I don't have the logs anymore of course) and I think it's SoD when round kick finally at least parses the same as regular kick. The first 1-3 ranks of the AA are completely worthless, and round kick itself is worthless until those higher ranks of feral swipe as well. I put a bug report in on the old system and never got a response, and never got a response on the forums in various threads either.
Do you remember if you had any kick damage mods when doing that parsing? I don't think there are any Round Kick damage mods in the game (unless they are monk only), but Kick damage mods do exist. So I wonder if Kick is still better in SoD with a mod, or if Round Kick becomes better earlier than that when you don't have a Kick damage mod?
This is pretty big and sucks. Beastlord is already on the short end of the stuck DPS wise in early eras and having something like this is a trap for newer beastlord players as they see it and automatically think "oh, that'll help my dps" Having this addressed/fixed by devs would be a nice help !
Couple clarifications on your question: -The hit from round kick would still hit for significantly less than regular kick. The thing that makes it better in SoF+ is that Feral Swipe takes a huge base damage increase. Ranks 1-7 of Feral Swipe have base damages of 17 (GoD), 34 (TSS), 67 (SoF), 84 (SoD), 93 (SoD), 105 (SoD), and 139 (SoD). I don't know how the base damage of kick / round kick scales with skill though, and I stopped parsing it out once feral swipe got better. -The kick mods add flat damage to the end of the calculation, which is negligible by the time you're 85+ and your base damage is much higher. I probably accounted for this but it's been a long time. Edit: Found some old numbers: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...-feedback-post-ros-patch.245822/#post-3608931 ~40DPS for kick vs. ~20DPS for round kick + feral swipe at rank 1. I also went back and dug up some old messages. Apparently in SoF with Rank 3, Round Kick + Feral Swipe beat Kick by 30DPS in my parses. So it's only Rank 1 + 2 of Feral Swipe that lag behind.
