As long as I'm eliminating the consideration of HP debuffs from Assassins/Brigs/whatever I might as well throw in the debuffs from bards. Though most raids will want to run 4 bards anyways. If your going to set up a scenario where you actually look at DPS scouts for straight DPS you might as well say "all the bases are covered".
Sounds like there is a lot of speculation and opinions. I guess that is going to be the case until this tuesday when the patch actually comes out. That said, I must say, I used to play a dirge and being fully aware I was not a "DPS" class I was still sick of my parse suffering due to having to rez on raids or not getting the proper credit for my buffs. I took a break from the game shortly before AOD came out. Been back about a month now and decided to give beast lord a try. Played one in the first eq and loved it, and now I can finally be a DPS class YAY. Got him to 95 have him mostly EM raid geared, nothing special. I must say Kinda sucks that I just spent some time gearing him out and reading all this stuff about how beast lords are terrible and Buffrat, whos advice I've always found to be sound, saying he would even kick one for something else on a raid? This is a class we pretty much bought an expansion for? I'm not a fan of pay to win, but if you do pay for a class it should be a top contender for sure? I am really happy about the brig and ranger changes announced in this game update, they were much deserved and over do. IMO assassins should always be single target tier 1 dps. Regardless of if you account for HP debuffs, other debuffs, group buffs, or just raw DPS, The beast lord should be respectable to say the least. IMO I would have beast lord just behind rangers and assassins but bring some of the utility to the table they have with spiritual stance, while in feral. A buddy and I were pretty drunk the other night and we like to spitball theories about class changes and what not. Seeing as BL is a combo of Brawler and Shaman, instead of an offensive and defensive stance - How about a Brawler and Shaman stance. Feral they would have some avoidance (since they have NONE now) and it would be the DPS stance, then in spiritual they would have all the utility, power, ward stuff and maybe while in that stance, instead of defensive stat bonuses it would apply a group regenerating ward? I guess I am getting off topic, my apologies, I just an kinda demoralized I came back to a game I've loved for so long, picked a class that was supposed to be great, and everyone is sour about them? Don't get me wrong, I don't pick the flavor of the week because its the best. I don't even need the beast lord to be the best. I just wish there wasn't so much negativity surrounding it with GU66. Buffrat, If I may address you directly, you ditched dirge and made a BL and are now dropping that for Brig? all great classes, I've played them at one point or another in my EQ2 career - but why are you hating on the BL so much? or and I mis interrupting your posts? (aside from the lack of HP debuffs -G
snip... Firstly, carriage returns are our friends. Please include them in future discussions It is too bad about combat log structure and ACT. It is a great 'debugging' program and I certainly feel it is a valuable tool. The problem with them both is that the combat summary/export to clipboard allows some information to be routinely misinterpreted. The 'utility' classes are DPS classes, just not direct or primarily attributed DPS. We are all mostly aware of that, but I think some forget from time to time. It is often clear when you dig into the logs, past the encounter and zone-wide summaries, and look at specific abilities what contributed a meaningful percentage of an individual's damage, and what came from group-wide procs that recipients had some but minimal control over. As for rezzes disrupting and destroying parses for a dirge, I feel ya, but for the time being and near future, that is just part of the territory. Coincidently, healing disrupts the DPS parse of my mystic friend, and it really annoys him when he has to heal, but he still accepts it as part of the tradeoff of being a tribal chieftain trapped in a priest's body. If the consequence of dirge rezzing on a parse needs to be explained to those just ignorantly posting parse summaries and questioning dirge performance, then they are possibly overlooking something that should be rather obvious. Start posting rpm (rez per minute) and encdc (encounter death count) parses. In other words, if you want to parse better individually as a dirge, do less rezzing. To do less rezzing, the first thing that you must do is to encourage everyone else to die less. Sometimes, often times, it is in their realm of control to minimize personal death. If they can't manage that, they should at least be ready and accept an offered rez immediately. Wait no more than a moment (to account for lag/resource loading), then leave them till they decide to come back from their post-death rage-stealth-afk. Not only is the dirge losing personal dps by waiting for somsone to accept the rez, but so is the group and the raid at large, and it puts the dirge and the group/raid at greater survival risk, since the dirge isn't paying as much attention to possible incoming effects that they may need to mitigate. I am sorry that you bought an expansion solely for a single 'DPS' class. I bought that expansion too, yet I do not have any of that class on my account, and never intend to, so why did I buy it? Reforging, higher AA caps, mercenaries, and a few other reasons, like tradeskill apprentices. Do you not take advantage of any combination of those things too, besides access to the particular class? Even as the most casual raider without the extra AA's and reforging, life would be harder. Just like everyone else, I paid for my classes along the way, and I do not feel slighted that I 'had' to buy other classes that I do not utilize at this point. At any point in the future, I have the opportunity to more fully utilize the others if I so desire, even the beastlord. The beastlord, despite the woe is me attitudes of late, has been used in a widespread selection of guilds as the premiere choice for scout DPS raid slots successfully to this point through several content releases, so they must work well enough. Part of that was based on a mythos (partly/largely attributed to Buffrat). More to the point, reputation played a larger part in giving beastlords that premiere status than it should have. Many of the other DPS classes would have and did work just fine in a 'beastlord slot' in the past. While there may be some 'significant' coming changes to the class, and lack of 'needed' other changes, the class is far from broken. I am sure my guild and others will continue to use them to successfully to progress the best we can can because that's what we have. Other guilds that have the luxury of optimizing setups to the highest degree may get a bit less mileage out of their current roster of beastlords, but I suspect that has been a long time coming. That is one of the consequences of not knowing how gearing and abilities will mesh until after you have fully committed to the experiment. That is part of the fun of this. Trying different things out and seeing the results. If nine seconds on a particular fifty second fight determines how you go in, awesome. I admire that level of optimization. That does not mean you cannot succeed and have fun without being fully optimized, you will just have to scrub a bit harder, a bit longer, with a bit less to show for it, like the rest of us.
Beastlords here are being a bit over-dramatic. They still are a very useful class and if you enjoy yours then have fun and keep at it. Buffrat and a few others are min/maxers competing at the highest level and are trying to maximize their value to a raid. Beastlords still have plenty of value and nobody's going to kick you from a raid for playing one well. The only thing that's changed is that rangers got made useful and have competitive value now vs beastlords when it comes to progression fights. You don't have to be upset that you invested time and effort into a bad class.
Agreed, any well played class is valuable to a raid. Class knowledge and the ability to follow scripts/directions is way more important than min-maxing every single class you bring. However, it still doesn't change some of the fundamental issues with the BL class that have yet to be addressed. I'm anxious to see how the increased warder hit-rates are going to help out as well as the summoning changes. Just a few more areas that still need attention.
I appreciate the replies. Just to clarify I did not buy AoD just for the beastlord and I do take full advantage of those other things, my point was that it is a class you do need to purchase. I certainly do not regret buying Aod even if I never played BL. I guess I'll have to try out the changes tonight Thanks again -G
