Hunting in lc is a highly paladin favored zone and if you are hunting undead half of them are light blue it’s going to favor the pal bard combo just to support your assertion Go do it in st and include 50%live mobs
I'm so excited to post in this thread, because I actually have a long Paladin parse that doesn't make me look like a trash-tier Paladin alt, which I am. Maedhros is pretty spot on about the bard giving a lot to the Paladin, but there's some caveats here. First, the big shiny numbers from a Sunday morning crawl through Howling Stones: Combined: A mortiferous golem in 4258s, 1,658.0m @389388 | #1 Gotnerfedsk + pets 823.4m@(193.5k in 4256s) Oh baby, that's some Paladin goodness. I had my good Bard friend playing both his Bard and Shaman in this group. He's the Bard that usually rolls in my caster group on raids, and we've been playing together for a couple years now. He really understands my reckless play-style and has a ton of practice keeping up with it. The fact that he was on his Shaman, which he's really good at, along with some smart disc/clicky planning meant I could straight up two-hand tank most of HS, even on larger piles of 6+. Adding in Shaman Epic, Ancestral Aid, and Lion's Roar also inflates this over what just adding a boxed bard would do. Collaborative stroking out of the way, it's good to frame this properly. My Paladin is an alt, but I've put a lot of time into him. He's got full RoS raid, including Mercy, Swordsmaster's Honor, and an Invested Honed Wurmslayer. I did the Artisan's Prize and Crestra's Empowered Earring on him. He's not "best-in-slot," or quite where a serious main would be, but he's pretty close. If this was a parse from a really good Paladin (I'm about a "6") in min/maxed gear, you'd definitely see higher numbers. We're also talking about a mostly undead zone here. In a pure live zone, you can probably cut this number down to between 100-150k. If you were under-geared or mostly sword and boarding it, reduce that even further. Remove the ADPS and it drops like a brick, even with a two-hander. Paladin DPS is pretty bad outside of niche situations or undead murdering smorgasbords like HS or ST. Don't get me wrong, you can put up some disgusting parses with strong heal support, your two-hander out, and full ADPS, but it's not going to be the norm. Most of the time you feel like you're swinging a wiffleball bat at mobs while tossing water balloons at them instead of spells. I love my Paladin, but if you've got an SK that's already 105, roll with it. It's the better boxed character by far (Paladins require significant focus to make "work"), does more damage with or without ADPS (by a large margin) even on undead, and is a much stronger overall tank than the Paladin. The main selling point of the Paladin in group content is that you can take literally any group of 5 people plus yourself and be ready to murder things. No healer required, you can do that while tanking. It's a pretty awesome feeling, and makes getting your friends together for an evening of slaughter a breeze. If you're planning to run a duo that's probably not something you're super concerned with. but.... tl;dr - both SK and Paladin are super strong. Tanks in general are pretty broken at the moment. Pair them with literally anything and you've got a functional group. Tank+Anything+A_bit_of_skill = 99% content completion. Grab the one(s) that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside and don't look back. /rantsturbation off
Putting the same effort into a bard as you would the necro, you'd be looking more at the paladin doing 150k DPS and the bard doing 80k DPS easily for a total of 230k DPS. The bard would likely do more DPS than that if it's just the paladin/bard (more Boastful Bellows/Vainglorious Shouts fulminating leads to a lot more DPS). The bard still won't require as much attention as the necro, as you would only need to switch screens to the bard every ~12 seconds between BB/VS casts whereas each necro cast would take ~1-5 seconds to be effective. Judging by the OP I don't see how bard is really relevant, since it was SK/BST vs PAL/NEC. If I were OP, I would choose to go the overpowered route and SK/BST, but that would require a lot more attention to accomplish things than PAL/NEC. Both shadowknight and beastlord are button heavy classes compared to shadowknights and necros which are less button heavy (but still require more button pressing than say a warrior/bard combo). Either way, pick whichever one is more fun to you. Both Shadowknights and Paladins are in a very strong spot right now and even a PAL/SK group would be absolutely amazing with the paladin tanking and the shadowknight doing DPS.
Parses are really subjective and it is important to understand all the context when you try to analyze them. This is a parse from me solo with a cleric merc in Sathirs Tomb running sword and board without swapping to 2hander. I only had paladin self buffs, cleric merc buffs and haste potion running. Combined: An Arisen skeleton in 1684s, 78832k @46813 | Maedhros 78832k Whats stunning is that this was only 5 total mobs. The Guardian Golem alone was.. A guardian golem in 1152s, 36736k @31888 | Maedhros 36736k I did not burn, I only used the sword and board and it was pretty brutal. 36 million hp was probably actually 32mil and then hp regen I assume. The next is a parse from boxing my bard and running two cleric mercs. I used my 2hander almost exclusively unless a bad pathing resulted in a multiple mob situation. I would then swap back to 2hander as soon as the mobs got crippled and slowed. The argument that a paladin running group gear being unlikely to use 2hander makes little sense to me. A smart player would try an easier zone so that they could maximize their results. If you can not tank with the 2hander in Sathirs Tomb you should go to Lceanium and make it happen there. Combined: A pyre golem in 2517s, 711.8m @282813 | Maedhros 520.0m@206.6k | Vaniddar + pets 191.9m@76238 The numbers work out that with my bard box and utilizing 2hander I did about 6 times more total dps. I killed 54 mobs in that time at an average of 1 mob every 45 seconds. I made sure to turn off attack on my bard around 10% on most but not all mobs to try to maximize the Blessing of the Faithful procs; something a necro box could not do with their dots. As for the named parse: A Kar`zok grave robber in 599s, 105.7m @176378 | Maedhros + pets 56902k@94995 | Vaniddar + pets 48748k@81382 I can imagine a necro box would have pulled ahead on this particular named as it was a pretty long fight, but it was a live mob and I did not have Blessing of the Faithful on for it. Xalgoz the Arisen in 58s, 24354k @419903 | Maedhros 24354k@419.9k That parse is from a few nights ago grouping with a bard and beastlord with 3 cleric mercs up. Obviously the beastlord added quite a bit to my dps on that one, but I posted it to illustrate the vast difference in potential dps depending on the name, adps and whether or not BOTF is on. I cannot stress the importance of that enough. I am incapable and not desirous to even try to run a necro box as my necro is on the same account as Maedhros and I think the tandem is poor. I would definitely be curious to see what you guys find though. I just really cannot see a necro box multiplying a paladins solo dps by a factor of 6 and averaging a kill every 45 seconds in Sathirs Tomb.
Thanks for putting in the work on this, those numbers are really impressive! I'd be really curious to see similar parses for anyone who thinks that pal/nec can beat that. I really enjoy multi-boxing and I more or less agree with you, getting a lot of out the necro is tough. A couple questions: 1. What's your damage source distribution on your paladin? Roughly, what % comes from auto attack vs skill clicks vs spell damage? On warrior it's like 90% from auto-attack and the remaining 10% from a short list of skill attacks (rampage, shield break, sheol's war blade), so Beastlord's dichotomic fury pumps my warrior's DPS full of light and rapture. It seems like it does the same for paladins too. 2. What is the drop in defensive capabilities between 1h/shield and 2h? Ex: for warriors, at a guess, if 2H was 100% damage taken, 1h/shield is 60% and dual wield is 65% or something. I never really parsed it because dual wield is so close to 2H DPS and so close to 1h/shield in mitigation that I rarely use 2H.
Thanks for the update maedhros. A couple questions: 1. why did you compare sword and board solo but only show us 2 hander with bard. Can you not stay alive with 2 hander and only 1 healer Merc? 2. could it potentially be more damage to use 2 caster mercs and focus on healing on the paladin? Might be worth looking into unless you already have. 3. what is the mob composition like in this zone? Are they mostly blue/light blue? I think in order for a necro to reasonably compare to the bard it would need to be against white/yellow mobs. Either way, thanks for all the numbers they are helpful for sure.
1. Paladin dps is far more from melee than spells. I have heard some guys talk about paladin spell dps being super vital but I do not really agree. When you have a group that has solid adps and you're able to run around with the 2hander it feels like a big loss of dps to cast some of our junk dps spells knowing you're losing some melee rounds while casting. The Doctrine spells are fast enough with enough dps potential to use, but since they only work on undead its hard to load them. I really hate that there is no place in the game in years and years that was all undead mobs. Its almost always a mix, which really limits the ability to use undead only type of spells. 2. Pretty sure that paladin weapon affinity is the same as warrior's. We just don't have dual wield. Warriors have better mitigation but paladins make up for it with our healing. 1. I had intended to do 4 separate parses, but when I experienced killing 5 mobs in 15 minutes with the solo sword and board I said to hell with it and just did the 2 extremes. We can guess that with 2hander solo with merc that it would be about 70-80k dps or so. It feels pretty sketchy with one healer merc though yes. Gotta love when I am at 50% health and the merc is sitting at full health and you see them cast a freakin group heal. 2. Thats not viable. If youre playing in a zone where you can run 2hander and require no outside healing, you should goto a harder zone. The dps from wizard mercs is so bad, you get better bang for the buck with healer mercs and 2hander vs the hardest mobs you can handle. 3. Its a mix probably 60/40 undead/live in the east wing of Sathirs Tomb. The golems have massive amounts of hit points though so if you did a break down of the total amount of hitpoints of the mobs, I would not be surprised if it was closer to 40/60 undead/live. There are no blue con mobs in the zone to my knowledge but the con seems fairly irrelevant. I don't notice any significant difference between the even and yellow con mobs to be honest. The mob type's matter more in terms of how long they survive. The undead and devourer's probably have the same amount of hp, but paladins obviously kill the undead faster if I get a few slay procs off on the mob. The golems are awful though. So many hp.
Dual wielding warrior plus pally in undead. Party time. I have really grown to appreciate my pally box. Guess I should mention is Pally has Mercy and never tanks...just dps role. I make it a point to avoid golems. The slimes aren't so bad in ST. The rest of the undead just chewed up.
To the OP: I would rule out the necro based on the fact that necro dps is dot-based, meaning that you only see the full benefit/glory of necro dps if a fight goes very long. Awesome for raid mobs, but terrible for group mobs where you want the mobs dead as fast as possible. It's just a fundamental aspect of the necro class that is in opposition to ideal group play (quick killing). When you're relatively new and it takes a long time to kill stuff, the necro seems powerful. But as you get better and start to kill faster, the necro will hold you back. Compare that with the beastlord, which is great dps right from the start of a fight AND provides awesome ADPS to whatever tank you choose, and the decision is pretty obvious imho: Beastlord over necro every day. Regarding tanks, that debate will rage on forever. I personally find my SK to be amazing, well-rounded and I would never trade it for anything. I bet Maedros feels the same about his pally My personal duo is SK and Druid. When I 3- or 4-box, I add a beastlord and a wizard.
Thanks for all the reply's.. I have been doing the Sk+ BST. So many Pet aa's to get. I have playing the necro solo for lesson of the devoted once in awhile.
