I am returning to the game after a baby-induced break . I am thinking of building a box group, I want to keep 3 current toons: mage, bard, shaman. I have been down the road of mage-boxes, it gets old . I am thinking: MAG, WAR, SHM, BRD, BRD, ? I want to have good dps, and I really like bard synergy, dissident, and alliance. My question is: if I want to be able to comfortably trigger bard alliance, what number of bards would I need? Would 3 bards be effective? I am considering the following for 6th spot: BRD, BST, DRU, MAG. BRD for dicho and more synergy awesomenes, BST for pet/melee/dissident, DRU for ports, alliance ae heals, MAG for pets and synergy (this is my least favourite option). Any thoughts? I use ISB (If I can get it to work again ) Thanks in advance.
Update: I am down to BST or BRD for the last slot, I like BST a lot for this slot, but also love the thought of having quite a few bard fulminations pr trash mob .
A bard box group is interesting, I haven't seen it done. I've never played with multiple bards and don't raid so don't have any particular advice on it. I would, however, go relatively all in and add a third bard to the group to push the fulminations like you say. With only 3 spells needed to fulminate, once you get the Rube Goldberg machine running properly you should be putting out impressive DPS with it. Taking advantage of bard's synergy is easier than other classes because the damage bonus is piled onto one swing/spell instead of spread out like the beastlord synergy, but you'll still get some loss. I spent a lot of effort trying to stagger the mage synergy from my 4x mages. Bard dots have become useful the last expansion, but a solid 6 box team shouldn't make much use of it due to killing so quickly. Synchronizing quicktime, fierce eye and epic will also be important. You'll also have enough swarm pets to cycle through for your mage to have no excuse not to use Of Many 100% of the time (once you get ramped up). A beastlord would provide some ADPS to your group, but only the warrior will really take advantage of the HHE from dicho (though the bards will be happy when the bst synergy is up and their melee hits go from cute to modest). I never parsed this but I'd guess that you'll get only marginal DPS gain from the ATK buffs from the beastlord due to the bard and shaman's buffs already boosting your ATK. The beastlord's DPS relies on DoTs a lot and you'll be killing just a bit too fast for their DoTs to really take effect. I enjoyed having my beastlord in my group but ended up replacing him with a berserker. My bet is that in terms of overall lethality a 3 bard group will be eclipsed by a 1 bard group with those slots being filled by a berserker and cleric. There's just so much that a bard does that does not stack with other bards and in your group only the mage/war benefit that much from having high uptime on the bard's epic/fierceye/quick time. Even if you get a really clean way to execute fulminations, the group will have mana issues that you can't solve because of the way bard mana works.
You can fulminate alliance with 2 bards. Not every 2 seconds like we can do on raids with 7+ bards, but it will fulminate. I'd go with the Bst for the last slot, not a 3rd bard.
Thank you so much, Tucoh! I will go all in with 3 bards! Bardception here we come I will make sure to use your advice when I move ahead. That the group will be mid tier DPS is totally fine, I think it will be fun .
I tried to do some back-of-the-napking calculations, it looks fun, but not as good as I expected. I looked at a scenario, where I would try to cram as many Alliance and Synergy into a short initial phase, after which I would resume a more normal combat mode. This should get the trash mobs down fast, but also save some mana and get back to maintaining the regular songs so that they dont drop. With 3 bards in the above party, I could get a delta dps with Alliance and Synergy of about 575k, for about 15 sec. even that would cost a good chunk of mana. This is close to best case, so more an approximation of upper limit. Ballpark numbers for party dps, sustained, was: WAR 300, MAG 150, BRD 50, SHM 50 (Alliance and synergy not included). That adds up to ballpark 650 base dps sustained, then with aonther 575 for the first 15 sec of every sinlge mob encounter. It is good, but I can’t help thinking that adding 2 WAR instead of two of the BRD would give a sustained dps of around 1150. I have been on a EQ break, so my numbers might be way off, but perhaps in the right proportions? It seems as Bardception is quite a lot of effort for an unsustainable, comparable result WARception...?
I have been playing around with warr bard bard. Yes you fill alliance with only 2 bard, but 3 is much higher % to overall dps, as filling alliance is 3 nukes, and name of game is as often as possible, as refresher is 1 tick to 1 bard, so 2 is half a tick and 3 would 1/3. Often in these cases 2 bards are going need double on insults, 1 is caster of alliance and other is filler, so looking at nuke1 nuke2push aria back to nuke1 4th song, so 2.85x4 to quickest fill. 3rd speed things up and overall mana drain is longer duration. Note is possible to nuke support nuke support or nuke support support nuke, based mana, kinda of peak dps vs duration. while stacking bard is intersting its not for all, I enjoy, half downtime on FE QT epic on warr, and powerplay him, I have so many setups from balance, to not sure if all stacks peak dps, DATA still inc, IE if suffer is support 2 in mix, but will cycle for 7 songs does secondary bard sing suffering at 5 of 7? At 115 and tons of AA, dots are measured dps as well, the topic is huge. TEST TEST TEST calling out all drunken bards, sing all sing tonight, enjoy the afterlife for when one sings others will join, and power will grow, chick long a dude that can sing and play an instrument. SK are groupies of eq, and mercs are ! ie we pay every 15 mins.
The war will get very solid boosts from the bards and the shm if you press buttons at the right time. 300k dps just with auto attack is not unreasonable. (bard on melody)
I, for one, love having a second bard in my 6 man - we can really get a good mixture of melody twisting and as I have fairly twinked gear and a great healer, I was able to pull & tank which is a mess of fun.
If you are going with multiple bards, you can then use songs the tank will really love as well that increase healing, mitigation and ac along with all your dps and adps. Especially if you have 3 bards in there. Should be fun post back let us know how it works out
I've considered doing this, but the mana drain on the bards would result in quite a bit of downtime during group sessions. I tend to role with 0 downtime required so I couldn't get past the annoyance factor I've also considered doing an SK with the rest being paladins to play around with their innate group healing and lifetap procs and see how well that worked out. Probably not worth the time to set it up properly, but once I'm retired, I'll have nothing but time if the game is still around in 20 years
Semi on topic, but I just started a 3 bard 3 box on test, it's amazingly fun. I started it more or less as a meme, and to test a couple of questions that I had about stackability and multiple buffs, but it turns out to actually kick . I've been 3 boxing for a very long time on test, and have run pretty much every conceivable combo, this is one I haven't tried lol. I'm really excited to see how this plays out at later levels, because at this point it's really fun and effective. The stacking dots are surprisingly effective at mid levels (which I wouldn't figure), so it's going to be interesting going forward once I can start some proc shenanigans.
There was an all bard guild on FV at one time. The level 2 AE DoT will stack so before the movement nerf was put on bard dots they'd swarm all over mobs and kill remarkably fast
