MegaThread:Top DPS Per EQ Expansion

Clerics should be out parsing rangers

Any time a Bard was in top three anywhere would have meant all the pure DPS were basically AFK, or dead, Bards were on parses obviously but never in the top 3, ever in any non-casual guild.

Regarding the luclin stuff...

Wizards own emp for sure. But your vt parse tells me you don't have many tryhards. So it may be less of a class thing vs an ability thing.

There's no bards on the trash parse and i routinely did well there. You can't touch the true shot rangers on bosses though. I'm surprised there are so many wizards there and some may be good for sure, but the lack of high melee classes has me suspect.

Bards are absolutely capable of parsing top 3 in TBS. Bard dps at 75 is stupid.

Precisely when the bard got the bellow upgrade (tss?) Bards boss dps went way up. I'm not sure how long it lasts, and my guess is that it has peaked and will mellow out since bards kind of work with upgrades few and far between.

But, i haven't gotten that much better and quite a few anguish or older pieces, my bard parses very well on bosses. Not over tryhard monks, but easily over sloppy dps. Of course, I also have parsed well over beatbox bards. All that's to say, I think at level 75 a bard should pop up in most boss parses given raids only have 54 people now anyways.

Going forward, I'm skeptical their dps scales... of course I still use epic 2.0 so there is hope.

This is just a bug where they didn't smoothly apply changes properly.

Boastful Bellow XV - Level 74

Target: Single
Resist: Magic
Duration: 18s (3 ticks)
Hate: 33
1: Decrease Current HP by 330
2: Stun for 1s up to level 74
3: Cast: Boastful Conclusion XV on Duration Fade
4: Increase Incoming Resist Modifier by 6
5: Limit Resist: Magic
6: Limit Resist: Fire
7: Limit Resist: Cold
8: Limit Class: ALL

Boastful Conclusion XV

Target: Single
Resist: Magic
Hate: 57
1: Decrease Current HP by 570

Boastful Bellow XVI - Level 75

Target: Single
Resist: Magic
Duration: 18s (3 ticks)
Hate: 240
1: Decrease Current HP by 2400
2: Stun for 1s up to level 75
3: Cast: Boastful Conclusion XVI on Duration Fade
4: Increase Incoming Resist Modifier by 6
5: Limit Resist: Magic
6: Limit Resist: Fire
7: Limit Resist: Cold
8: Limit Class: ALL

Boastful Conclusion XVI

Target: Single
Resist: Magic
Hate: 1500
1: Decrease Current HP by 15000

Going from a 330 DD with 570 doom trigger to a 2400 DD with 15000 doom trigger for an AA line within the same era is absurd. They are critical nuking for far more than wizards in that era.

But this just goes to show why a master thread of top DPS across 26 expansions of EQ is nonsense. There will be random blips where certain classes are stupidly OP especially with how many changes they've blanket made across classes that don't give much consideration to lower levels.

As someone who had a Monk and a Rogue during Kunark, I think the people saying that Monks out-damaged Rogues are assuming that the Monk had the best gear in the entire game. My Rogue finished his epic quest the same day he started it and dealt amazing damage throughout the entire expansion. My monk never even got a Robe of the Lost Circle, and the one time I saw a Tranquility staff drop, it got ninja'd. My monk was strong, and dealt decent damage, but nothing compared to my Rogue who could literally KS an entire group with relative ease as long as I could keep my aggro low.

I also see a lot of people saying Wizards were top damage, and in raids, that might have been true. But in regular dungeons, I was in groups who would exclusively run all Rogue DPS because of the fact that they didn't use mana and it meant we could easily do Disco 1 and Disco 2 in Sebilis, something that was generally unheard of at the time.

TL;DR Most Kunark Rogues had their Epic fairly early on and dealt top tier damage, while a lot of other classes had to wait a really long time or get really lucky with loot drops to deal peak damage.

I saw very well Raid geared Rogues going up against equally well geared Monks, all of them players who I have known a while and consider them all very good players that had lots of raiding experience from live on those classes and the Monks were topping the tables, Rogues were just behind them in dps order but numerically were a long way behind, like 70% - 60% of the Monks DPS ouput, sometimes less.

But the Devs balance the classes DPS for the live game they rarely worry about the dps on TLP most of us just accepted that Monks hit the Jackpot on TLP.

Is this a TLP experience or a 2000 experience because it sounds a lot like the latter.

The latter. My Rogue had a Ragebringer while my Monk was still using bare fists and had no FBSS. I knew Monks could deal insane damage with good gear, but most of my monk friends were in a similar situation as me where they never got a Jade Mace or FBSS.

I remember at the time that people actually said that the Rogue quest was so easy because they would be useless without it, and it was kind of true, because every Rogue I knew had their dagger fairly early on.

You may not be aware of it but there were a lot of changes to melee between 2008 & 2015 I don't know exactly which patches etc as I wasn't playing between those times.

While the changes to the live game were slight they had a knock-on effect that was amplified the further back you went in the expansions, a big part of that extra damage all melee were doing necessitated the Mark of the Mighty buff on Raid NPCs to make the events have any challenge at all. Those changes were not evenly distributed though.

Due to how those changes affected melee damage Monks ended up being the major beneficiaries, their auto-attack damage got a huge boost, way higher than other classes, while Rogues were the one class least benefited by the changes.
What that ended up doing was changing how the classes stacked up against each other so the DPS paradigm of the live game people remembered was now vastly different on TLP servers as a result.

So yeah Monks won the lottery on TLP & it made them top dog DPS for a long while, but as the TLP get closer to live that boost effect becomes less & less.

In my experience, at least up to PoP, damage is threat capped, so the top DPS is going to be any class that can dump threat the most effectively. At least as far as raiding goes.

What top tier dps other than mage cannot drop threat in pop?

Rogue, monk, ranger, wizard and necro all have tools for this. I haven't raided TLP PoP; are shamans/druids competitive DPS after the various DoT changes?

I never saw a druid on any parse and the only time I saw a shm parse was on a full vt trash clear where they were second only to bard.

The raid dynamics almost never allow a druid or shaman to go full dps though so who is to really say. Shaman could very well be competitive but limited by aggro.

Druid is def limited by aggro on a TLP. They can do ok if you preload the tank with a ton of threat, but they're not top tier dps by any means.

My question is, really, if druids and shamans would be top-tier DPS if they had an aggro-drop tool, or if they'd still be behind Rng/Mnk/Rog/Wiz/Nec.

I was able to at least show up in the top 10 as a druid around the end of Kunark in 72 man raids on fights that didn't block fire/magic. By Luclin I could no longer go full burn without pulling aggro and dying. I suspect if aggro wasn't a concern you'd be respectable damage still but never stealing that top spot from any of the dedicated classes. If I'm remembering VT fights right (last time I looked at my damage meter) I'd be doing about 15-20% behind the top person when I get squished.

They'd still be behind the real DPS classes, but a well played Druid or Shaman without aggro concerns can place 10-15 in a full raid.

Shm do get a agro drop. It just only has 2 charges before it needs to be recharged.