How does one obtain the recluse/arachnophobia nimbus? Only certain times in the marketplace? And, why not Exotic Gem instead of Cracked Shard of Frozen Light? Does it get resisted far more?
I believe the Nimbus shows up in the marketplace eventually and the form of the recluse prize is just pretty rare from lon cards. I've been trying to find a form of the recluse for a while now without any luck. Venril or Rile resist disease. Maybe both do, I forget. So, for Sathir's Line it's better to have the ice proc and to use fire tonics instead of dragonmagic. Plus for shorter burns it's better to have ice/fire procs so they benefit from Season's Wrath or Elemental Arrow. So, that covers T2.1 and T2.3 which are the best two events to parse. Skyfire is the only other one I really care about and the exotic gem + AE staff works fine there.
Interesting. I'm assuming a non-slacking situation all around. Can you tell I don't play a dps class based on my questions? (Unless you count my amazing wizard merc who at least seems smart enough to exit lava instead of just heal himself like my healer)
The sad thing is that there probably are druids out there that never DPS and bards that only do like 10k. When together they should be equal to at least 1 1/4 wizards. That's a lot of DPS being lost cause of lazy people.
Oh, and speaking of the bard. How would it change if you swapped wizards for mages or necro's? Would they similarly benefit from the bard or not as much? Will the bards personal dps + amp up the dru/enc/(caster, caster, caster) enough to make it worth using a bard vs another caster?
Mages see a slightly larger benefit from a bard than Wizards, although if your Wizards are meleeing and your Mages' pets are lagging a lot it probably is pretty comparable. DoT classes, including Necros, get a lot more out of Aria specifically because SPA 124 (the focus it has) crits for DoTs but not for DDs. Because of that (and FE/Epic), they'll see an even larger benefit than Mages and Wizards. Necros have a larger variety of modifiers availalbe through their own burns than Druids/Enchanters, so on short fights they will see some stacking issues with Aria (which Druids/Enchanters don't experience). That said, for sustained DPS they still likely benefit the most of any caster. Edit: Plus, you really don't want more than 3 Necros with stacking issues and their burn times aren't very conducive to putting a mage or wiz in their group. So in summary, yeah, any caster group where each class is played to its potential would benefit more from a Bard than a fourth caster. Plus, in reality your fourth caster probably isn't as good as your first three.
I am going to make an assumption. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. A bard is going to provide more benefit to your best caster group than it would your third best melee group...
We all specialize and learn our archetypes as best we can It doesn't leave a ton of room for learning more than a passable amount of knowledge in another archetype. Sancus pretty much covered your follow-up question. Everything we've talked about here doesn't even include all the QoL things a Bard brings to a group, like Selo's, that can't really be quantified. tl;dr - Caster groups deserve Bards!
Instead of just talking about T2.3 I decided to make a video. I'm still working on getting OBS and everything configured right but it turned out OK.
I'll probably do a few more. I'm going to try to do one that actually shows my Gina overlays and maybe one on FV that shows all the lag we have on that server. And really on Xegony I'm still missing a few things like a couple eye of decay levels and bifold, etc. I even think the call of xuzl change in tomorrow's patch could make a decent difference. Either way, I'm still only coming in like 4th or something in the parse on this one so it's not like wiz dps is that strong. And that's even with Intensity.. I had to use staunch too for anyone that didn't watch it all.
I think the real question from the video is... What did you deserve to be put in the same group as Sancus? That is some torture punishment right there...
I used to have Sancus in my group all the time, until he told me that I should not group with him anymore. How insufferable!
Here's this week's Sathir Line. We still haven't figured out a new ADPS rotation based on recent changes and kinda messed things up a bit. But DPS didn't really get hurt too much even with only 42 people on this raid and not everyone we usually do. Although, that may be why there was so little lag. This time I recorded the whole display so it would capture the Gina overlays. if anyone wants triggers, etc I could post them somewhere.
Cool stuff! Couple of questions/clarifications. Do you not use wildether barrage while ITC is going? Only regular Twincast? And is it smart to use alliance while all those burns are going? I always thought you'd land any ethereal for more damage while all burns going and could focus more on alliance after your initial burn is down. You use Dicho on a burn? Thought it's dps was a bit weak sauce compared to ethereals with burns going but could be wrong. Although I noticed it didn't use a ITC counter and thought that it did, despite not ever twincasting. Thanks for this as always though!
