Originally Posted by
carraway
Noctis answered most of the questions I was going to address, but I can elaborate on a few points.
A full 8-person BR with Magic -> Magic -> Staggered WSs (each consecutive WS being from a different class than the previous WS) needs to fire in under 10 seconds to be considered worthwhile, and realistically speaking, this is not practical in most situations. Archers independently maximizing their DPS rotation will outpace the added output from a BR, because the sheer act of locking people into a BR significantly reduces DPS; this is also not mentioning potential loss in DoT uptime from THMs/CONs while they are locked into the BR. This has been my theory for a long time and my shell has corroborated it during 5-chest DH clears.
For this reason, I have left the BR-related buffs off my loadouts. I won't reconsider them until either challenged with conclusive data or until significant overhauls are performed to how BRs work -- chiefly, the forced period of inactivity.
From personal experience, my record with a Crab Bow +1 and Silver Arrows on Deepvoid Slave (ogre) was a ~850 Trifurcate buffed with Raging Strike II, Ferocity II, and Hawk's Eye. Two out of three arrows were crits. The average fully buffed Trifurcate/Multishot is in the 600 range. This is outside of a BR, obviously, and with no impeding of your regular rotation. Self-buffs get raped hard by all WS dmg coefficients, which is not something that a BR can overcome (barring, again, a super-fast 8-person BR with the proper ordering done on the fly).
You don't end BRs with a Bloodletter. You don't ever use Bloodletter with buffs; that's pointless, because as a WS, it's similar in its dmg mod to a Foeseeker. The point of everyone using Bloodletter right when it wears off is because if you set up a rotation and someone in the order gets a resist or misses, realistically speaking, the next person in the rotation is not going to respond quickly enough to maintain uptime. Maximizing Bloodletter uptime without overwriting at the end is significant damage (ogre fight of 3:30 = 7 Bloodletter procs = 3500 damage), and the simplest way that I've found to ensure maximum uptime is just to tell everyone to refresh it when it wears -- and if you know that a particular Archer has slow reflexes or doesn't watch the mob's debuffs, tell that person to just never use Bloodletter ever.
There are certainly ways to better min/max loadouts for pure DPS on boss fights, but I never change my loadout during a DH run. My reasoning for this is that I always want to be ready for any kind of situation that might arise, whether due to player mistake (someone else's or my own) or RNG. So I keep all of my utility/defensive skills on my bars, even if I don't use them.