Well you are correct that I do use ascension abilities when I can work them in to my rotation, but I do not build my rotation around them. As far as ascension class I am a Thaumaturgist, so dps wise the weakest of the 4. However, I do have my 3 dps abilities at GM. Septic Strike, Virulent Outbreak and Blood Contract. Everything else is still apprentice. While they do sit fairly high on my parse breakdown when I do use them, my highest parsing ability is Vengeful Arrow followed by the Paragon proc from our 4th epic quest reward item. Virulent Outbreak will generally sit #3, then 4th is a toss up between Septic Strike or the Blackwood proc from the epic. Now that I finally finished the KA collection reward neck Septic Strike is solidly in 4th because of the increased effect on the neck. On AE fights Barrage will take the cake because it's all I hit. I just spam it over and over. For trash / VC charge pulls I'm always #1 though no one cares about parse standings on trash. As far as the utility over a defiler or mystic it has been a while since I've played either of those classes so I can no longer speak from personal experience on if those classes have gained anymore useful utility since the end of AoM beginning of ToT, but seeing myself against the mystics and defilers I have grouped or raid with, my previous statement still holds true. Channelers smoke them. Now every toon is not the same, our gear choice, reforge stats, aa choices, group make ups, temp buffs, clicky's, hardcore end game raider vs more casual player....will inevitably cause a disparity between what you see and what I see. This is where it causes a problem for devs to balance classes. Who do they balance against? If they tune epic spells/ascension abilities around the casual player then they become near useless for the top 5% of the player base pushing bleeding edge content. If they tune it around the 5% then the casuals start screaming for nerfs because all of a sudden Ethereal Assassin, Geomancer and Elementalist dumbfire pets, Beastlord, Assassin and Ranger epic dumbfires are tuned for end game raiding, but allow for those people to solo heroic zones because they do 20 billion points of dmg. I don't know if Pixilicious is your Channelers name or how you're geared or spec'd, but you can click my signature link to look at mine, but just as a rough breakdown, my solo stats sit at: 15 deity points in stamina 20 deity points in crit bonus 25 deity points in potency 415 resolve 27k+ potency 4150+ crit bonus 360k ability mod 12mil hp 72.7 fervor with no heartbind 102.7 with. 600 dps mod 900ish haste 250ish multi attack 105 flurry 150 wdb 100 strikethrough 100 accuracy I'm not trying to brag or make your opinion of our class any less valid. I just want to show where I'm viewing the class from. There are more and more Channelers being played as of late which I love, but having done a search about 2 weeks ago of all the Channelers who are published to EQ2U across the 25 highest raid guilds across all servers, no others are sitting where I sit so I have no others to compare myself to. So from my chair our epic and epic spells are exactly where they should be. They aren't overly powerful, but also not useless to me. Sorry for rambling on.
This wasn't really about me or about my toon, more like about you, and your maxed toon, comparing yourself to others in your raid or group who are more than likely not as well geared or/and with maxed out infused gear as you are, and I'm not here to dispute your awesomeness
