reviewing bard alliance within raid

OK so normally we only get 2 bards per raid; and we generally feel its a losing dps battle to alliance with only 2 bards vs max adps to your group.. the goal is overall dps. So time flys by and maybe bad habits are learned.

Revisiting best options for if have 3 or 4 bards
we say each bard for this example is aaa bbb ccc ddd etc
In the dps channel or sub channel party animals bard aaa calls out Alliance at %t nuke nuke

Is it best for the other bards to mash a forced nuke hotkey to fulfill the alliance? if this is true.. rolling into next alliance etc.. do make 1 bard recast it with other nuking based on end or mana pools? and at what number does this cost or gain the raid dps overall?

Of course we are using alliance on stuff that live that long.. but lets say pofire snails or bones, for examples or named bigtime target?

Feels like there is balance of the alliance and adps for others.. I don't care 1% of my personal dps if I was the chosen bard to alliance over and over. I can about wins. Maybe I typed that wong.. mora is better.. but I don't have an ego based on my placement on the list.

Basically we are out of practice for so long.. if it does trigger 100%.. I question the value of it. If its costing my dps group overall dps. I think im wrong, yet to do the math. Looking for suggestions or examples.

Note I seen the example of ATs in gina for use over channels.. for me it lagg too much and i generally hate gina anyways.. just not a fan.. zones me out. I want to focus on having fun and winning. thanks for the advice or suggestions.

If your goal is overall DPS then Alliance is worth it. Frankly most classes can't just put out 2 million damage nukes in addition to what they normally are capable of. However I am inclined to agree with you if your only at 2 Bards I wouldn't try to maximize Alliance casts unless you're raid is doing a coordinated burn and you have 'A Tune in your Head' running to make sure your ADPS songs are not wearing off.

You say you're not interested in your personal DPS; however, let me argue this: how much does each song you sing provide DPS wise

A couple examples:

Example 1:
Melee & Storm Blade:
I hear this song brought up a lot when it comes to running 6+ ADPs songs for melee type groups, but frankly the proc is only 100 damage (600 if the person procing it is wearing a belt with boon of the seeress effect on it) assuming we are ignoring the healer turning on auto attack that is 3,000 damage if all 5 melee toons (bard included) swing and proc in a round.

Or compare one of your insults that deals 22-28k base and 80k+ on a critical hit, lets assume 22 is the base of your weakest average hitting insult, to make up for the damage of not casting insult the collective melee in your group needs to proc 36 procs in the average of 9-seconds (6 second recast + ~3-s cast time) to make up for the fact you are not casting an insult. Look at any recent parse especially a class like Rogue that swing very quickly and you will find that the average proc per 10-ish seconds is about 2-3 if you take that number and apply it best case scenario that is about 15-ish procs per 10-seconds which fall short... thus in my humble opinion I would remove Storm Blades in an instant in favor of an Insult.

Example 2:
Casters & Qunard's/Dekloaz:
Casters will tend to want a Fire or sometimes the Wizards will also want a Cold focus song, but frankly the spell lines only tack on a relatively small amount of damage to the spells (1,987 for Qunard's and 2,781 for Dekloaz @ Rk. III)

Lets assume there is a Druid, Enchanter, Bard (obviously), Wizard, Wizard and a Magician in our group. Also lets assume the Druid is occasionally Nuking while healing (so he has both a Cold and Fire nuke, so we will run both songs). I'm 90% certain lets are also bonus damage to the nukes, and not something that gets applied to the base damage of the Nuke, meaning they are just bonus damage tacked on at the end and not modified in any special way. Currently only 3/4 of the members of group can benefit from the songs (our magician friend strikes out as they do not have cold nukes) thus for every Fire nuke the group performs a total of 7,948 is added and for every cold nuke the group performs 8,343 damage is added for the collective group, Additionally casters will have various cast times for their spells meaning it isn't instant and there are various recast timers (this could reach a small novel so I am going to say they average 2-3 casts at best in 9/10-second window meaning every 10-seconds and assuming only fire/cold spells (which isn't realistic) you're providing the group 23,844 fire and 25,029 cold damage only... Now if the Druid is require to heal these numbers goes down, or the mage needs to send in a swarm pet, or the Wizards use a magic / nuke that doesn't meet the criteria of the spell they will not benefit from these songs. Thus at base damage it seems these songs make up for the lack of an insult... except that your insult unlike the bonus damage of your Wizard spells can have a critical effect for 80,000+ damage whereas these songs cannot and will only ever do 23,844 / 25,029 every 3 or so nukes...

Therefore I would humbly drop one of these songs (preferably Dekloaz in this situation) and run an insult over the cold focus and frankly maybe even the fire focus if an all our burn is called.

*** The point of this small wall of text is = most of the Bard songs are filler spells ***

Basically most of the Bard ADPS power comes in the form of:

Aria - 25% overhaste + flurry mod + Triple Attack mod + 40+% spell damage mod
War March - Haste to hit the 200% cap before overhaste becomes a thing + attack (never bad)
Arcane - Because who doesn't love high damage procs (and with casters/hybrids the proc has a chance to proc itself again and again)

Melee - Suffering - A good damage high damage proc for melee all around

Casters - Qunard's Aria is probably more useful since the majority of high damage spells are FIRE based & there are more fire based damage spells than there are cold over the caster classes, but basically the ADPS takes a serious dive at this point

Additionally i'm not Bard main by any means, but essentially having messed around with the Bard Alliance on my alt I can tell you if your really serious about improving the overall raid DPS then Alliance/Covenant of Sticks and Stones is something to strive for, but in a raid scenario you really will need at a minimum of 4 Bards to make it worthwhile and still provide meaningful ADPS for your group.

Here's why: essentially Bard Alliance has the same recast as your insults (6-seconds) meaning that if 1 Bard were to maximize Alliance casting over the course of 1-minutes worth of time they could in theory cast 10 Alliances in that time frame and have them fulminate. At Rk. III of Covenant (alliance's upgrade in TBL) of Sticks and Stones that is 2,508,361 in addition to the debuffs effect of 116% - 125% increase in damage after they critical effect (meaning even more damage than the 2 examples I listed above). Therefore 1 Bard alone could passively deal 25,083,610 damage every minute.

Here is the catch, you need to cast Alliance and have the debuff land on the target and then have 3 Insults land (i.e., not get resisted).

Bards have the unique ability to do Alliance a handful of different ways. . .

1st Method: Single Bard maximizing Alliance/Covenant casts

This is by far the easiest to set up. Essentially it is just like how you mentioned above 1 Bard is assigned to be the Alliance caster.
So for example Bard aaa sets up a melody to provide support songs and every 3rd song (songs are not hard capped at 3-seconds any longer because of certain AA lines, so you will have to micromanage to reach 10-for-10 in 60-seconds) is Alliance until 50% mana for example (again assuming you have 4 Bards in the raid total and it is being fulminated within 2 songs of you casting it), then when Bard aaa gets to 50% mana you would announce a switch to Bard bbb for Alliance and Bard aaa starts a melody that has a support song followed by 2 Insults (basically every 3rd song is support because your trying to maximize fulminations for the main bard). Continue this cycle until all of the Bard are either oom/event is won.

For example the 2 melodies your looking at are something like the following

Main Bard: Alliance, Aria, Warmarch, Alliance, Arcane, Suffering/Qunards (group makeup depending), Alliance, X - Filler, X, Alliance, Aria, Warmarch. . . etc.

Support Bards: Aria, Insult 1, Insult 2, Warmarch, Insult 1, Insult 2, Arcane, Insult 1, Insult 2, Suffering/Qunard's (again grp dependant), Insult 1, Insult 2 . . . etc

Pros: 1. Easy to set up, easy order, easy 2 or 3 simple raid dps/adps melodies that pretty much anyone that has a rudimentary concept of a Bard can understand.
2. A lot of passive damage that frankly no amount of ADPS is going to produce event with the top tier players playing said classes
3. Support songs (except those with counters), last approx 30-seconds so making a stndard 'buff' melody and running it prior to the engage should mean that the most important sogn buffs stay active on your group.

Cons: 1. requires making a lot of small melodies for the Bard assigned to Alliance or you will need to manually twist songs as Metronome AA and Quicktime will speed up the cast time of songs enough that alliance will refresh before your 3rd song is ready.
2. Arguably the worst performing Damage per 60-second time-frame. Basically the Bard assigned can potentially be capable of dealing 25,083,610 damage via fulmination damage + the 'bonus' to the 3 individual Insults every 3rd song or so, but only with micromanagement.
3. You (and furthermore the other Bards') will not be able to do a 7 buff song weave, the weakest songs will have to get benched in lieu of providing the raid ~25 million damage over the course of 60-seconds (I kind of consider that a fair trade).

Granted 25 million damage in 60-seconds is nothing to sneeze at, but theoretically there are better returns for the slight pain that is coordinating a very-well trained Bard team.

Method 2: Alternating Alliance/Covenants

Ideally you would break the 4 Bards into 2 teams A and B
Bards aaa and bbb are in team 1
Bards ccc and ddd are in team 2

Essentially it works the same as method 1, except in this case the Bards' aaa & bbb are alternating Alliance casts. However, this requires more coordination than method 1, the tradeoff however is your getting almost twice the Alliances (and hopefully fulminations) as method 1.

** You will need to make sure you have the following lines of text, because the Alliances will not overwrite each other.

Alliance landing: "is targeted by a covenant of sticks and stones"

Alliance Fulminating (& safe to cast next immediately): "bones are broken by sticks and stones"

Essentially Bard aaa casts Alliance (announces in channel) while Bards' bbb, ccc and ddd all stop their current melody to activate a new melody that casts an insult, within 3-4 seconds you should have a fulmination and then Bard bbb immediately stops his melody to cast Alliance, while Bards' aaa, ccc and ddd all stop their melodies and activate a melody that has insult. . .

Or here is a crude visual representation:

Bard aaa: Alliance // Insult > Aria > Warmarch > Arcane > Suffering/Qunard's > X

Bard bbb: Insult // Alliance > Aria > Warmarch > Arcane > Suffering/Qunard's > X
** Bard bbb staggers his melody out slightly**
**** Bard's aaa & bbb are going to be doing a lot of micromangement!!!

Support Bards: Insult, Insult 2, Aria, Insult, Insult 2, Warmarch, Insult, Insult 2, Arcane . . . etc

As I mentioned it is crude but the Idea is to alternate Alliance cooldowns with Bard's aaa & bbb, the goal for this is your going for more than 10 alliances (and more importantly fulminations) per 60-seconds. I have seen this strategy work on combat dummies in the GGH getting close to 17/18 in a minute (out of the theoretical 20), but in a raid you're going to have a variety of factors that is going to limit this but an accomplish-able goal is 12-15 per 60-seconds

Pros: 1. More damage from Alliances and fulminations than the single Bard method.
2. Works well with a surplus of Bards, bare minimum is 4 for this method however 5 or 6+ it becomes relatively more lucrative as there is more insults being cast from support Bards and more room for any errors that come up.

Cons: 1. It is basically ordered chaos teetering on the edge of total Chaos.
2. If something goes wrong the entire thing falls apart very quickly with only 4 Bards. However, this is a very solid choice if you have more than 4 Bards as there is more room for error.
3. In addition to it being very chaotic, the 2 Bards working Alliance will be playing a very fine game of micromanagement of songs and it can quickly come apart (essentially twice the error, as method 1 because 2 are micromanaging vs 1).
4. ** not for the easily confused Bard members in your guild. If they cannot grasp the basic concept and play their part, it will fail every time.

This is arguably the most difficult method in my opinion, but the most rewarding one, essentially if successful your Bard team will give your raid (at a rough minimum) approximately 30,100,332 - 37,625,415 every 60-seconds. However, i'm going to mention this again, it is basically ordered chaos teetering on the very fine edge of total chaos, but in theory with a high number of Bards in your guild this easily becomes the most profitable one as the again, theoretical, cap is 20 alliances per minute with enough Bards throwing enough insults at the target, but even then 17/18 alliances per minute is still worthwhile in my humble opinion if you get a large enough Bard team to pull it off.

Method 3: Round Robin Alliance Casts

It is really simple, your Bard team treats alliance/covenants the same as any other DPS class and has an order to Alliance casts and everyone participates before restarting over. In my opinion this is kind of a waste because of 6-second recast time on alliance, but it does allow everyone to participate and isn't all that difficult to set up.

Essentially each Bard is going to have a support melody that is set up with either 1 or 2 Insults in the melody. I will write out the 1 Insult melody:

Melody: Insult, Aria, Warmarch, Arcane, Suffering/Qunard, X, X, X. . .

the hotkey for alliance will look something like this:

/stopsong
/cast # (# is cast gem slot for Alliance/Covenant)
/# %t has alliance, nuke now (for example)

Then simply re hit your melody key again. every Bard starting with aaa > bbb > ccc > ddd > . . . does this over and over until oom/event ends.

Pros: Super simple, easy as literally every other class with an alliance, only difference is you will still cast slighty more on average compared to other classes.

Cons: Doesn't really maximize on the recast timer of alliance, rather it is a medium of the road / this works well enough . . . ish method.

Your looking at maybe getting 6 - 8 of these tops every 60-seconds or so. It just depends on how far you want to maximize on casting alliance and how aggressive your Bard team is.


NOW

All of the above is assuming you have 4+ Bards i na raid. in your original post you claim to only have 2 raiding Bards. IF you care to entertain the thought and your other Bard friend is willing. You can cast Alliance/Covenants now, however, it is going to require some coordination and you're going to need to have the AA "a tune in your head" on your buff bar for both of you; additionally your only going to be able to play at most 3 supporting songs.

For Pure Melee I recommend Aria, Warmarch, and Suffering
For a Melee/Hybrid Group I recommand Aria, Warmarch, Arcane
For a Caster Group I recommend Aria, Qunard's, and either Arcane if Wizards / Warmarch if Magicians

Your going to make a similar hotkey:

/stopsong
/cast # (where # is spell gem # of Alliance/Covenant)
/# %t had alliance (for example)

Then melody of Insult 1, Insult 2, Aria, Insult 1, Warmarch/X, Suffering/X etc.

If Bard aaa casts Covenant, Bard bbb must restart the above melody and vice-versa.

It is worthwhile to use Alliance/Covenant if you can, essentially no ADPS song you play after the first few is going to amount anywhere close to the damage of the fulmination of, and unlike most other classes a 2 man Bard team can actually cast a surprising number of Alliance and fulminate them so long as their groups know they are going to be getting 90% of a DPS boost rather than the full 100 with 7+ songs.

I feel as I should bring this ramble to a close, but to basically come full circle if you use Alliance it is going to cost your group some degree of DPS, but the gain will be consistently hitting for 2.5 million damage each time you fulminate your alliance and frankly the only songs that provide that much damage overall for your group are easy enough to keep on your group with ~24-30-seconds worth of time that you can comfortably do an Alliance rotation and keep the most important songs full time on your group and occasionally sprinkle in stuff like regen and procs and other thing that only adds 1,000's of damage vs 10,000 or 100,000 or 2.5 million for example.

Thank you so much. I 100% sure both myself and other main bard agree but maybe couldn't convey all that thought into paper like you did.

I have posted theory nearly the same as your 3 option routes and maybe was a little heated when posting it.. raid team lacked focus and it was a wasted night. Back to subject at hand, mental I agree and so happy to similar thought process posted. Its like early years of eq when everyone shared all info.

Most melody is at base 8, sometimes 7 to sometimes more.. if situation calls for it.. and the AA is up.

Thanks again.. now work on bard3 cccc and bard4 dddd.

adventure well

Id suggest that one bard do alliances with just Sathirs insult in the melody, and the bards responsible for fulminations use both sathirs and Tsaphs. If thats too much for the alliance bard, switch off halfway through raid or whenever is convenient. Less chance of mixups that way.

I don’t have a ton of time to explain this all. Moldar’s post is in the ballpark, but his calculations are off on Insult damage because he is ignoring the ADPS it adds, which is significant.

The short answer here is that Insult is one of the bard’s best songs and it should be sung as often as possible. Of course, the song has one of the highest opportunity costs due to it being one of the few that uses a resource, so it’s up to each bard to work it all out.

If each bard is playing their highest level insult as often as possible, as they should be, then Alliance usage and success comes natural. I know this is an oversimplification, but that’s 95% of the story.

Just repopping this with an update.

We still only get 2 bards 95% of time.. wish we get more but it is what it is.

For this example I use myself as Alliance bard.. and other stud muffin as fill bard.
Myselff AAA Stud muffin BBB

AAA
I use a melody of sarth insult aria sarth insult suffering sarthing insult arcane, 4th mix in.. sometimes AE mana sometimes AE haste.. sometimes reckless. and I pinky finger alliance as I tap my foot counting.

BBB
Uses a bind mash for 2 insults both sarth insult and icky push 107 one. I cant recall the name Tspath?
and runs support stuff.. I suggest we mirror nuke support nuke support nuke support nuke support.. to min both alliance and group support.. we are working out the details.

if the third bard we get ever logs in.. he or she would be similar to BBB.

We both activity talk and are willing to adjust to the event. So i like thank everyone for help.. we have improved both personal dps and raid dps.. Adjustment both here in thread and patching others.

Currently im glaring at my white thinking i need return to Hint slot 5 augs over Hdex... i burn up mana fast before.. but its mega race now.. maybe find a balance of Hsta, Hint, Hdex is key.

Thanks to everyone both in this thread and others i rant on. Glyph of Acrane Secerts for bards xmas wishes please or benefit from a potion or 3.

War March is stronger for most groups than Suffering/Arcane, might work that in

Sathir's Insult shares timer with "the icky push 107 one" Travenro's Insult, they can't be combined like you imply. Also "bind mash" isn't really a thing for bards? Anyhow, the second Insult to use in a 2-nuke melody against bosses that aren't rooted or walled is Tsaph's Insult, it's 105 and does no undue push.

2-nuke melodies reallllly stretch melodies, though, since it takes combo Tune Stuck & Quick Time just to keep buffs on (without those, even 3 buffs have a 1-3s gap), and QT does disrupt 2-nuke song ordering like it doesn't the 1-nuke versions. It's slower Covenants, like 15s instead of 10s, but they still fulminate so I definitely recommend just sticking with regular nuke-1-nuke-2-nuke-3-nuke-4-nuke-5-nuke-6 on the second+ bard(s), not going to double-nukes.

yea its 100% chance I misunderstood what the other is doing and reposted his role incorrect.

one of us is AE haste to the raid.. so other is normally not using the group song. 100% one of is aura haste or mana.. and other covers the other one.

he says he breaks melody and mashs a nuke key with sever nukes bound to that 1 key.. if I understand him correct.

if its just the 2 of us.. its like 19.25s for fill.. 3rd bard would bring down to 12s second.. 4 would be a wet dream.

War March's primary benefit isn't the haste; everyone should have haste from permanent buffs. War March is for the very large Atk boost, hit damage% and min hit%. AE War Chorus doesn't replace March, it distributes a much weaker boost to groups that have no bard at all.

A normal melody of Sathir 1 Sathir 2 Sathir 3 Sathir 4 Sathir 5 Sathir 6 should fulminate nearly every Covenant with an Insult going out 1/tick & 3 ticks to get 3. It's possible to get unlucky, so one could slot in Tsaph's as song #4, but dropping the whole bard class' worth of buffs by dropping /melody for sure ain't worth it to get Covenants.

This works OK without Quicktime, but once the spell haste kicks in, this melody will break.

Now that A Tune Stuck in Your Head is passive, we will have more opportunities for better DPS/ADPS.

JennBRD

it doesn't break with or without Quicktime, that's why to use it in the first place