I play an alt Troubador for guild raids and have worked to get his dps up from truly horrible to something better. He has approx 150aa with t2, couple t3 and epic. I view him as a support class but when I see people listing parses of 6 to 8k I wonder what I am missing. Certainly Mythical is on the to do list as is getting to the end shadows choices but..... Looking for any suggestions based on your experience that has helped you get your dps significantly higher...while still doing jesters cap etc. sorry for the noob question and thanks for any inputs! Arrog
Gear is huge... My Troub ends up in the low 4ks in the right group, but i would say my average is about 3.8k DPS on most raid mobs. Gear is a good deal of it for sure, AAs are probably more important at the lower AA tiers. I hear people talk about casting order, and I was wondering what you think a good casting order is? See a lot of people say correct casting order, but no one wants to offer advice there.
A lot of it comes from other classes you are grouped with. If you are lucky you might get a Inq as your healer for a DPS mod boost. You might get an Ill for Illusory Arm and get a double attack boost. So gear and skill get you so far, then after that it is the luck of what your group makeup happens to be. I have been in the MT group and hit 10k, I have been in an all caster group with no Ill and I hit around 4k. Having Illusory Arm would likely boost that 4k to 6k or so.
My casting order for the start of a fight is: 1) Depressing Chant 2) Spell Rebuff (until it lands, move to 3 during recast delay) 3) Rhythm Blade 4) Dancing Blade 5) Chaos Anthem After that what I do it team up shorter cast arts/spells and cast them between melee swings. Done right you will swing-spell-spell-swing. When those are refreshing you can land longer cast spells like Overture and Lamentation. Biggest thing is not to delay your auto attack since it comprises probably 35-40% of your total DPS.
Important stuff for good troub dps: -Melee crit, far more important than spell crit in my experience -DPS mod, very very very important. -Melee Double attack, important, but not at the expence of melee crit. -Spell crit, craptastic mythical proc gives +15%, so not all that important. Learn to time swings on autoattacks like Kulanae says, usually 2 casts between each cycle, depending on how much casting speed/recovery you have at the time. Making sure people treat you as the dps class you can actually be, and not the /follow class many people seem to think we are also helps, get buffed like any other scout.
Thanks for all the replies and suggestions. One more question....does anyone that uses Profit UI feel that it helps out minimizing time to administer Jesters? I have never really played a healer so I have held off on Profit but if it makes JC easier I may have to reconsider. Thanks, Arrog
Prophit UI helps with cures and such and yes the occasional JC to an odd person it helps, but I still perefer using macros. I can just setup the MT and healers and the obligitory caster and just hit them in order. Sometimes finding their name on the raid tool and clicking the right little box is time consuming.
I see a lot of people talking about jestering healers and I have to ask why? I mean at certain times sure you need to help out an individual healer (Zarakon adds for instance), but honestly you are going to get WAY more milage out of JC on your main damage dealers. If stuff dies faster and the fight is shorter the healers will love you long time.
Number 1, gear. Number 2, gear. Number 3, gear. Then, buffs you receive are really the most critical thing, tbh. I'll have the names all wrong but basically DPS mod from coercer/dirge/inq; ember seed or what ever proc is from conjuror; damage proc from wiz (ro's blade?) or warlock (bertox?) (don't stack so its A or B, not A and B); Illusionary Arm (DA), Time Compression (yeah right, like you'll get it) like tempo and haste from Illusionist; DA or melee crit or whatever from the healer you got instead of an inquisitor; raidwide from bruiser; etc... With a current shortage of dirges in our guild we often run with 3 troubadors. Even the weakest geared troub can out parse the best by 50% if he gets inquis + war/wiz + illusionist + conj vs. the short bus group... Regarding timing your spells + CAs vs. melee swings, not really true and very hard to show. Just don't use your long casts (Overture and the green encounter damage for example... i cba to look it up and log in servers down) back to back. Mixing 2-3 short casts between a long cast and you won't delay melee much if at all (autoattack swings during recovery, I promise). As for JCAP, I find the UI mod useful for capping a random person that doesn't send you a tell but says it on ventrilo. Otherwise best to make a handful of raid JC macros. Fill in the target name in the box. This way you cast JC without detargetting your mob. Have one with target as %RT. This will target the JC to whomever last sent you a tell. As for JCing healer, it is totally situational. Your off tank is a bit **** and main tank goes down? Yes, JCap the inquis or Templar in OT group. Cleric could benefit from Sanctuary early and often in fight or zone? make sure they send you a tell before they cast it... as an example, in Tomb of Thuuga the skeleton mobs fear all the time. You would want to make sure to cap the clerics before they cast or you will be waiting a loooong time between pulls. Make a macro that does your basic melee Heroic Opportunity. Three steps: coin trigger, lore's, and your quick attack. use it everytime incursion is up. The short duration buffs are worth it and its much more effective than key stroking the sequence. Be aware of raidwide POTM and illusionist's group only Peace of Mind. PoTM trigger on spells (green encounter debuffs included + shrill, overture, incursion). PoM only triggers on damage spells, not debuffs. Vary your rotation accordingly. And obviously but importantly, stay behind the mob and in melee range... seems obvious, but you'd be surprised. When you have to range fight, be aware of evasive manuevers from your shadows AA line. It puts you in melee and out of ranged attack. So need to re-engage bow auto attack or have one of you two bow CAs queued. happy hunting, Aelder
Don't neglect your auto-attack, get weapons that match delay (myth is good), and even get ACT's auto attack timer thing that dings when you attack so you can get a feel when you need to pause between casting to get that in as much as you can. IF your DA and DPS and haste and all are up you do a ton in auto attack... to the point where you loose dps if you cast all your spells, even high dmg ones, during those fights.
Thanks for all the input guys...have seen some improvement and will continue to fine tune. NEW QUESTION but related to Troub DPS I now have the Troub mythical and was looking to invest in an adornment worthy of it.....BEST I can come up with is a +6 slashing???? Are there better options to invest in for DPS on the mythical? Thanks again, Arrog
As a troub you get both spell and combat arts... but you should play your troub as you would an assassin. To optimize your best dps, be sure to wear gear that increases your melee crit as well as your double attack and DPS Mod. I don't put a lot of stock in Spell Crit (that's just me). Also, make sure your AA spec is correct. I'd suggest checking out eq2flames. Be SURE to land your auto attacks. This is so critical for bard classes and scout classes in general. I don't know the exact percentage, but I do know that over 50% of your DPS is all about your auto attack. With a parser, you can set it up to where you can hear a chime every time your auto attack hits. The idea is to land an auto attack, CA/spell x 2 or 3, then land the next auto attack. The worst thing you can do is spam your CAs/Spells and miss your auto attacks. The number of CAs/spells you can cast in between auto attacks depends on your weapon delay which is usually 4 seconds. So you have roughly 3 secs to cast your CAs/Spells. Typically I land the auto attack and then cast a super fast CA/Spell followed directly be a longer cast then auto attack. Rinse and repeat. Casting order is best learned with a parser running and using a Training Dummy in your guild hall. As far as jester's cap is concerned, the order of JC "should" be something like: Brigand, DPS, DPS, DPS, Brigand or Main Tank, Brigand, DPS, DPS, DPS, Brigand. Main Tanks can get hit with JC if necessary, but they can easily be filtered later in the rotation. Healers can get hit with JC if your raid force is in a serious jam, or if it's requested by your Raid Leader. Brigands are one of your KEY JC components. If you have more than one Brigand, spread the wealth. The more times dispatched lands, the faster the mob dies. Personally, I have macros set up for all our key raiders so it's a simple click of a button that doesn't disrupt my dps output. I waste no time on clicking an individual and then clicking JC. Be wary of JC hogs. Heh, mages LOVE JC.. and will tend to put their importance really high on the JC rotation. Either way, each raid force is different and your raid leader may request a different rotation. Final note, don't forget to cast JC on yourself when you can so you can cast PotM more often. That does a tremendous amount of DPS for your raid force especially if you have a lot of mages and/or spell based classes.
Just a quick correction to a comment above. POtM does trigger on the green group debuffs. On big group fights I'll actually click the green debuffs off so I can AOE them again. I can jump into the 5K DPS realm on big AOE fights doing that where I'm normally around 2-3K. If it's a tough fight I'll leave the debuffs up and just accept my lot in life as a low DPS class.
