With the servers down all day I've spent a few moments looking through a number of the recent threads on this forum and would like to share some musings of my own. First off, my toon is well equipped but not spectacular. I am pretty much fully SF raid geared from the normal challenge mobs, as are all the regular raiders in our guild. Ok, we are all aware that we no longer need INT or STR and need to be concentrating on AGI to improve our abilities. Although I question the logic of how an increase in agility should effect my disease damage from spells, this is however the situation we find ourselves in. A good tip is to boost AGI with potions (I use the +90 versions). The first thing we should notice when switching out our TSO gear for the SF gear is that the generic scout nature of these items will mean that attributes we used to have such as Disruption & Ordination are no longer present. We need Disruption to ensure max nox damage from spells and Ordination to help ensure debuffs are not resisted. It's all well and good to adorn items with slash/pierce bonus, but don't forget to also adorn with disruption/ordination also. To this end I recommend 10 points in the Rhythm Blade pot of the bard tree and just love the boost of 8 points in Precise Blades. Rhythmn Blade is usually the first spell I cast when banging in DPS, especially when running RO. Initially it is very easy to max out DA and CRIT, although if you are raiding you will discover that these attributes tend to be scaled down in favour of Crit Bonus & Potency, making the juggling act of ensuring 100% DA & Crit a little trickier, (always good to have multiple items). Having said that; Fortissmio and DKTM have become largely redundant. Certainly it should be easy to drop the 5% Fortissimo increase in the Shadows AA row, even if you baulk at dropping the 10% in the bard line. I have been able to drop it totally, freeing me 18 AA points in the bard tree and 5 in the shadows tree. I've also been able to drop the 2 points in DKTM and would agree with the person whos posted that it would be nice if this changed to a different bonus, such as CB or potency. Where you spend this saving is debatable, but personally I have slammed into Bump & Stealthy Ambush. Use this tool to mess about with AA: http://www.beetny.com/eq2aa RO/VC is all about the amount of damage you personally are able to bang out over a 10 second period. The more damage you do, the more you distribute to the group when VC is running. The coercer in my raid group has orgasms over it. I generally save the VC for the last 15% of the fight as I have a weapon which procs more often from that point on. On starting RO I go with Rhythm Blade, Banshee, (Sinister Strike if its available), Bump, Scream Of Death & Luda's. Ensure you emote to your group when VC is running so that they can go nuts on dps. I keep BC on myself to ensure max personal dps for RO/VC. It has been a battle to convince the other melee dps that it was better off staying on the dirge as they all want the 5% flurry. The only time I give to someone else is if their DA is below 100%, (ie a slacker). Go with crit bonus on your weapons, not blast. Put all your regular healers in one large Gravitas macro, and simply rotate the ones you need on any given day to the top of the list. I therefore have all raid healers on one Gravitas hot bar button, and if one on the list cannot use Gravitas when I press the button, it auto drops to the next in the list. Fire and forget! use CoB pre-pull, as some mobs will have any AE effects interrupted when the tank pulls. use ProfitUI and time your spell casts with weapon swings for maximum damage. Can't think of anything else to rant about. . Thank you for reading and I look forward to reading views/flames etc. Bishoh (Runnyeye server)
