Face rolls around with 36k standstill POT? My mental math might be off a bit but that seems unlikely, even assuming he no-lifed his Tithe up to 60 or something. (To clarify, if it's not during raid, I sit in whatever ascension spec I'm leveling at the time, so I don't get the full base boost. I also sit over 30k during a good portion of raid combat. Also, I don't remember the thread where I said that, but I vaguely remember it being tongue-in-cheek.)
I did say rough estimation because at the time you were around 20k - 22k. His pot is in his signature now.
34k standstill... that's impressive. Dunno why you guys feel the need to be all secret-squirrel with your eq2u profiles, btw, but that's a different thread. What's his Fervor at with buffs up in raid combat? Who gets Bolster in your raid?
As annoying as I find you I will bite, You are in the 2nd best guild in the game quite possibly the best I really could care less. You of all people can break down and disect the greatest dpsers in the game on any mob that you guys currently kill. I can almost bet your parse alone would be better then 3/4 of the Beastlords in the game because of your overall raid dps output. Asking Doom to give you proof of his statement about Conjy/Ranger/Beastlord when you clearly have it right in front of you every raid night. Why don't you put your parses up here for the world to see how Overpower Beastlords are. Enough of trying to pick on the Average Joe's of the game let's see some real proof. You are clearly butt hurt because you can't outparse a Beastlord maybe you lost your raid spot to a Beastlord would also explain the salt. So many things in this game need attention like Sorcerers for one, even the playing field and then adjust Beastlords if they are still out to lunch ffs.
You seem triggered with your post. I have never lost my spot to a beastlord. We also don't have a beastlord or a conj, we do, however, have a ranger (who also wants to go beastlord because he knows it's true potential). You're right, I can not beat a beastlord that plays to maximum potential (just as I do), in a top 3 guild I might add with similar kill times. Idk (judging by what I spike to I'd assume he lands somewhere from 130-140) and Vynie
What fights are you even jousting? That might be why your raid wide DPS is so low? I'm comparing class DPS (including epic 2.0) vs class DPS. I don't care what people are doing with their ascension damage, although you can argue that all scouts have an advantage there with the fervor rune. Also, BL have an advantage there because of Truespirit's Ferocity. You're the one that was making baseless claims like "all buffs considered, Ranger/Conj are 8-10% ahead" when it is completely not true. All things considered, most guilds have a BL at the top of their parse. For a short while, we had a ranger "top of our parse" but when you removed his ascension spells, he was still behind the BL (they were pretty neck and neck, but the ranger had more master/grandmaster abilities than the BL). A well played BL will beat a well played Ranger. Conj is a different animal, and I believe has more DPS potential than a BL does. Again, I will say it until I am blue in the face, we are NOT ADVOCATING FOR A NERF. We just want Sorcerer brought up to match the other T1s, or at least given a fighting chance. Stop defending your damn class as if we're calling for nerfs. Stop acting like just because you think another class is on par or slightly better that it means we shouldn't advocate for some fixes for sorcerers. We are not trying to compare rang/conj/BL to each other, we are comparing them against sorcerers.
Difficult is a relative term based on the users ability and perception. On a grand scale Yards is right. we press buttons, things happen, stuff dies. But this oversimplification is what contributes to the BL are OP stigma that this entire thread has been pushing. I appreciate your intelligent response and bringing examples of why you disagree rather than spouting hearsay and generalizations. That being said when I claim that BL are more difficult to master and consistently parse high on than most classes I mean this. It takes more concentration and attention to maintain a bl than it does most of the other T1s and the gap between average players and top of class seems to be larger on a BL. This to me suggest a steeper learning curve. Look at it this way. If I were to write a Macro to eliminate human error and reaction time most classes would look something like this. Ability A-Z is ordered by DPS efficiency. The macro then goes down the list from hardest hitting to weakest.It asks an if/then statement Is ability A castable? if yes then press A, if no move to ability B. Is ability B castable? if yes then press B, if no move to ability C and so on. Many classes with this macro could get within 80% of a top players damage if that same top player where to spam the macro on their class vs manually press buttons. id even argue a closer margin on some dps. my proof? last year I raided with a conjy that was very good at his class. when he actually played he was consistently close to me on the parse. Our gear and stats were very similar. Neither of us had a myth hammer and our group buffs were very close. when he was bored or not feeling well he would use a spam macro. His parses went down but not by much. By leaving a few abilities out to be used with temps he could spam a macro for 90% of a fight and parse almost as high as paying full attention and manually hitting every button. Try doing that on a bl? I have and you cant get anywhere close. why is that? Because a Beastlord's If then statement is more complicated. its not only a matter of dps efficiency and is an ability up. its also heavily about timing, stack count, and due rav procs. You could turn the regular CAs into a spam macro to remove one aspect of the class but you still have to think about several other steps and having personally tried a macro that covers CAs and Advanatges it yields lower parses. Primal chains are close to how you described on most BL cast order but i found that maintaining Rampage VI is a much better dps gain. that adds a 18sec maintained stack that you have to keep refreshed. This means you have to make decisions like: is a weakness proc active? if so do you have a back attack? if so hit Rending if not hit glacial, Unless Rav is due in 5ish sec AND your intensity stack count is 8-9, if so hit a few extra CAs so you get Feral Intensity for full duration of Rav proc/primal chain also is primal assault available? if so are you close to a rav proc? if so hit before rav proc and primal chain. after your first wave of primals hit and you are no maintaining rampage you add in is Rav proc inc soon? if so does rampage have enough time to bleed into Rav time? if not hit a primal, if so wait for rav proc for primal chain. As well as, is rav due? if so is ascension ability up? if so does rampage have enough time to last through rav proc AND ascension cast? if no refresh rampage AFTER rav procs but before casting ascension then return to primal chain before rav timer is up. Also, is Rav due? if so is savage allies available, if so attempt to time savage allies to be up for entire 8 seconds of Ravaging while not using cast time for Allies during a rav proc. (3 sec window) Also, is hate near 100? if so is dehate availvable? if no will upcoming allies+primal chain+ascension be enough to rip hate? if so is Northwind available? if yes dont worry you have 10s of absolute nukage with 0 worries. if no prepare to ask for sever hate or pray you have wards/tank is paying attention. also, is mimicry available? if so is rav due? if so try and time mimicry macro with enough time to have chanter start their mimics when you are doing big damage but not too early while you are waiting for Rav to actually proc. Add in any movement or required script for a fight and timing, maintaining rampage/buffs/allies/asencions gets trickier. My final point on this matter is this. If BL are just as easy as every other class yet ZOMG WTF OP why are bot groups not using BL more? you inspect any stack of 6 players and chances are its a ranger, conj or necro or all 3 as their bread and butter for dps. Why is that? The answer is getting a program to understand everything I just typed is a lot harder to do than "is spell A available? if yes press A". Is any of this "Hard" or "Difficult"? short answer is NO. you press buttons, stuff happens, things die remember? but it does require more focus and timing than pretty much every other dps class that I have played. I have not played them all at top levels so I cant make the BL "harder" than ALL statement. There is nothing anyone can say to me to convince me that BL does not take more focus, more time and more patience to master AND maintain. If you don't agree that is completely fine. We should agree to disagree and leave it at that. With that out of the way I want to say how frustrated I am with the polarity this thread has caused among our players. While many say they don't condone nerfing, or they don't think BL are OP but too strong, or BL are OP and its not fair. Or the other extreme of BL are fine everyone else sucks. I think we can all agree that its somewhere in the middle. BL are in a good place with a high ceiling at top levels. Conjies and Rangers are in a good place. Necros are pretty close. Assassins need love. Sorcs need to be fixed/brought up to date. To mitigate future posts about which class is the OP class because "one guy parsed higher than me this one time". Id like to propose a game. Lets bring the community back together and put a smile back on Entropy's face by doing a little math. No i don't mean pull out your calculators and pick apart raid parses that have too many variables to be a level playing field. Instead lets do some testing of our own. on a level playing field, the good old fashioned training dummy. if you guys are down we could put this OP discussion to rest and have verifiable data sets for future discussions to reference. so how does it work? Well first take Ascensions off your hotbars/casting orders. Take Rising tide charms out of your casting order too. This inc spike damage to too large of a varialbe to be reliable as some may get myth crits and others not during a 50k pot boost. that skews things. Next we need to determine an achievable potency level to get to. A lot of you guys have stupid high tithe so you may have to turn off your ascension buffs all together. but if you can hit the high 20s that would work. I can get to 29k on my end or as low as 25k by shuffleing buffs. Finally, do multiple legitimate pulls preferable 10+ on a training dummy for atleast 5mins each. This balances out spike damage from myth/fabled crits and gives a good baseline. Then average your top 10 parses and post that ****. better yet lets all get together and make it a competition. You want to cheat by using HB or stacking pot? You hurt your class by skewing numbers. You want to make your class look worse by not playing at your best? You hurt your class and the point of this experiment by being a scrub. play fair we all win. The variables listed above could be adjust until an agreed upon baseline is met these are just my suggestions. If we actually do this. find a group of representative players that can get to within a reasonable % of each others stats I think we can finally put this crap to rest and actually come together as a player base not class vs class bs. It will give us more concrete evidence to show devs why sorcs/sins need adjusting. and It will solidify/silence the OP statement once and for all. If BL ends up 20%+ over all other classes across multiple parses I will eat my words and say we are OP. I think its gonna be BL/Conj/Ranger within a few % Necro close behind and some love needed for sorc/sins.
The reason why beastlords are OP is simple. The class gets so many additions compared to other classes. A class that is already basically strong, a chain of high hitting abilities along with advantages that deal a decent amount of damage when the chain is on cooldown, should not get: 3 fervor compared to other scout stances, 5% base cb/potency from Savage Defiance, easily sustainable 20% base potency temp. The reason why they are OP right now is because base modifiers tend to be OP. Combine that with a high base damage class, GG.
So why aren't we pushing to get the devs to bring the other "classic" classes in line with the mechanics that they have included with the beastlord class? Would that not be direction to head this conversation in? Working together instead of tearing down.
What you have stated doesn't change the fact that beastlords have the potential to be op. You also basically stated the mechanic for every other class if x happens do y. A majority of people who run bought crews usually just get the free scripts to run whatever classes are available to them. Do you actually run a bot crew? I find it funny when I do see bot players running around with mage pets out for their summoner class and you want me to believe that a majority of bot crew players are actually intelligent enough to make proper scripts (like a good botter could do with a beastlord). Edit: I find it rather funny when I asked multiple people from your guild who typically wins the dps parses all of them instantly responded with "the BLs." I am sure you run a guild with more than just BL dps.
We could do this on a regular training dummy, but we really need one with KA raid mob stats. Please help me petition the dev team to add one. Every xpac should have one as part of its release, imo. BTW, good post (not quoting all of it here). I'm encouraged to see other players who think about the totality of combat dynamics in this game instead of just looking at a parse and ignoring everything that went into that outcome. Fervor: Both predators get an epic skill that increases their fervor; assassins in particular get a +15 boost. The equivalent BL ability (assuming that the temp pets and heartseeker are categorized together separately) is a boost to our warder, which is frankly pretty terrible in comparison to "extra fervor on your stance" skills, because of scaling issues with main stats and the general weakness of warders. The ranger hawk is a damn monster. 20% base potency temp: This takes a lot of buff and timing awareness in combat to manage. In addition, if you leave it at 8 or 9 stacks (just shy of the 10 that triggers it to start), that means you cannot cast any more Advantages, which are by far our best "filler" abilities. If you're sitting there waiting for Primals or ascension to come off cooldown to push it to 10 stacks, you're losing out DPS by not just pushing through with Advantages. It's not a bad ability by any means, but please don't insinuate that we have it up every time we want/need it. Base mods: Yes, they tend to be powerful, if you understand multiplicative math. That's why I have continued to stress in this thread that GROUP COMPOSITION makes a huge difference in someone's DPS output. I used the "stacked mage group vs. main tank group" as a comparison - you're going to see a massive Fervor difference between the two DPS scouts in those two groups. I'll take the mage group any day. That's further compounded by who gets Bolster in raid these days. We're talking a sustained 50 Fervor difference when that's all added together. If we don't normalize for those differences, parses start to look skewed and people mistakenly blame "class balance", implying inherent T1 DPS ability imbalances. BLs have the potential to be OP? Please clarify what you mean by this "potential"? Is it the "group composition" argument I've been trying to get people to recognize? Are you talking burst fights, where I'd argue (and consistently see proof of) anyone with leveled Ascension and decent temp abilities sit on roughly equal footing? Single target vs AE fights? You're making vague statements that are hard to argue against because they lack context.
That's why there is a nearly perfect rotation (nearly because of fervor not proccing sometimes for ages #badluck).
I'm sure what veta means by potential is that if every class were played to it's fullest capabilities, then beastlords would be dominating. In other words you can't be terrible and be "op" but if you are a skilled player, you will be doing substantially more dps than any other class.
Which is why I use the best I know to base my ideas on. Most players are too casual to be actually good at this game. There is only a very small group of EQ2 players that massively stand out from the rest. If you measure class balance with two players and classes who have not completely learned their class it is not going to work.
"If x happens do y" is exactly what separates good players from elite players. It doesn't matter what class you are playing. The point that Veta was trying to make with an earlier post was not that BL are super easy "Spam to win" classes. Just pointing out the fact that BL are not any more difficult than any other T1, like you BL would like to believe. Any top notch player in this forum could play a BL and top parses. The conversation here is "In the hands of a top notch player, which class will do more DPS?" The answer is Beastlord. Stop trying to defend otherwise, or act like "it takes more skill, therefore it should do more DPS." That's now how this game was designed and it is a false statement. This game wasn't designed with "skill vs reward" across classes. STOP TRYING TO DEFEND YOUR CLASS AS NOT THE TOP OF THE PARSE. I'm looking at you Entropy. FYI Entropy, I have explained your buff allocation in this thread 3 times now and you keep glossing over it instead of responding, so I'll put it in simple terms right here again. You put the +% DPS boosting buffs on the highest DPS potential class, which is why BL are getting all the +% DPS boosting buffs. If, next expac, it changes to Warlocks being OP and BL are 50%+ behind them, you will no longer be getting those buffs and they will become Warlock buffs. It happens every time there is a regime change at the top of the parse. (AoM for instance, when you played your Warlock, I'm sure you got all the buffs)
You guys keep vehemently insisting that BLs, with everything else (gear and skill and buffs) being equal, are going to do "substantially more" DPS than any other class. I challenge that and ask people to run controlled tests instead of just making vague statements based on looking at parses, which do NOT account for equalization/normalization of those factors. Instead of doing that, you just keep coming back with some variation of "but BLs are OP". I really can't wait for the Tithe changes to go through. If the diminishing returns curve is steep enough, it'll bring the outliers back down into the same plane, and we can then more easily run some realistic dummy testing with our stats set to similar values. I am very interested in how an equally geared ranger, conjuror, and beastlord perform in that testing environment. For that matter, include assassin and the two sorcerers as well, to get a good reference point. This won't even be hard to do. Just give everyone instructions as to where to normalize their stats (call it perhaps 23k POT, capped CB, some reasonable base fervor, etc) and let us shift gear around to get there, and then run several 10 minute dummy parses solo, without using ascension abilities. Report back results. If people aren't sandbagging then it'll give a good idea of where things fall out. Preferably done with multiple people of the same class so we can see if player skill is actually affecting outcomes. I'm not trying to say that BLs are mediocre or wizards are amazing. My point all along is that you guys are failing to account for things that are massively affecting outcomes and then trying to make balance claims with the parse data. That is flat out WRONGHEADED. Wiegraf said: ...and my point is, if people ASSUME that BLs have the top end potential, because that's what the community narrative has been, then yes, most BLs are going to get the stacked groups/buffs and the narrative will perpetuate itself without anyone taking the time to think through another preferred buff placement scheme. I'll tell you straight up right now that an equivalently geared Conjuror has a higher DPS potential than I do right now; I watched what happened in the "before/after Epics" situation with that relative DPS, and it flip flopped.
Entropy just stop. You remind me of the old time tobacco companies. A huge majority of people getting lung cancer were smokers and they would argue that it wasn't from tobacco and come up with outrageous arguments claiming the proof wasn't proof enough. This is the same thing, if just about every guild who runs with a beastlord tops the parse, well there is your proof.
You act like tests haven't been conducted? I'm not here to show my work to you, but as a raid leader, it is my job to do the research to figure out where the buffs would be best placed. I don't think that Conj have a much higher DPS potential than a BL, I think it is very close to equal. I keep saying it to you over and over (And now Yards is saying the same thing), stop blindly defending a class that you know is the top of the parse. If you are being beaten on the parse by a conj consistently, maybe you aren't as good at playing the beastlord as you think you are? (not trying to flame, just suggesting). AGAIN, you are not the only person in this thread who can read an ACT log. If you will notice, the only people defending BLs in this thread are BLs who don't want to be nerfed. Oh by the way, EVERY SINGLE ONE of you is a BL that switched to a BL sometime last expac... when BL started down the road of becoming OP.
Entropy just accept the fact that if you play any other class except ranger and Conji, with same tithe gear you will always always parse 20% lower than you are it is now. And the parsing game is what kept this game competitive, so there are no reason why a certain class should have best parse cuz less utility. Everyone defending bl not op, roll an assassin and try to do the same, I am delighted to watch you fail and do crap. Btw assassin should really just go ranger or quit, BL not admitting they are op hence game is boring
