Thread: Carraway's Guide to the New Archer: 1.18 and Beyond

I and others in my shell tested Foeseeker and, again, you run into the issue of how WS damage coefficients rape the efficacy of buffs.

Originally Posted by Murugan

I don't really see a lot of DPS uptime when a BR should take no longer than 5-10 seconds to stack and launch. Having the melee stack first means that theoretically no one should be missing out on any of their cooldowns whatsoever.

As for the stacking on WS like I said I tried stacking on trifurcate and found it not to be so great on batraal post 1.18, but I do know that before 1.18 on the NM's and on just random shit it was great. I'll give it a try, but even still with no BR and no stacking on weapon skills I'd think it would be worth it to take cadence even for a solo BR by yourself over a random defensive ability on a single target fight.

Why not buff a multishotted foeseeker with it for example?

I was trying Cadence a few times last night and the only real problem i saw with it is that without swordsmanship (which i don't have cos i slack) the damage potency it provides and the 1min cooldown make it alot less effective than you claimed in your 1st post.

Even if you were the fastest button masher in the world you are going to miss atleast 1 lightshot cooldown, more if you are trying to fully buff the WS and with a lightshot doing around 60 damage per shot i just wasn't seeing that much difference from a cadenced WS.

Not to mention i was only getting around 3 Cadences in per Ogre kill because of the cooldown.

Maybe with Swordsmanship equipped and maybe if you Cadence your fully buffed trifurcate not only for the increased damage but also the tp gains it would be effective but from personal testing its at best less or equal to using a lightshot in its place.

Also Fully buffed 3 nocked arrow Foeseeker may look great damage but firstly a fully buffed 3 nocked arrow lightshot generates TP instead of using TP and because WS's cant crit and lightshots can it will generally do more damage than the Foeseeker anyway.

WS's sadly don't really have a big impact compared to lightshots currently so you are better off buffing Multishots/Trifurcates and WSing more often because of the increased TP gains instead of buffing WS's.

We don't use Light Shot or Trifurcate in BRs (except for applying Defense Down, but we don't do that either, since it is really only observably beneficial when used before a perfect 8-person staggered BR).

I don't know whom you're referring to when you mention Bloodletter-spamming groups of Archers, but that's not something I recommend in my guide, nor is it something I practice.

Light Shot delay is dependent entirely on your bow delay (4.0s for Crab Bow); the displayed cooldown is a known bug (see Current Known Issues on Lodestone).

The 8 second delay for a basic BR that does not take advantage of the bulk of actual BR benefits is 8 seconds of DPS uptime taken away from every single participating player. Let me know how long it takes you to do a proper BR. All magic and weaponskills must be from a different class than the magic or weaponskill directly preceding it in order to really take advantage of a BR.

Again, I fully encourage you to try Deepvoid Slave with as many controlled factors as possible, with BRs and without BRs. Beyond that, I don't think I'm going to convince you of the efficacy of unadulterated DPS uptime, nor are you going to convince those of us who hold contrary beliefs to you that BRs are, in fact, the bee's knees.

Originally Posted by NoctisUmbra

Yea as much as I like to think they would have figured it out by now, there are still r50 Archers out there that do not know how to use Bloodletter efficiently.

Bloodletter doesn't do crappy front damage. It does what is basically an expected damage from a WS. Simply saying 80 doesn't give any info. Damage done relies heavily on the enemy. That being said, Bloodletter is all about the DoT and the end damage - 500 - which versus certain foes of high defense is quite the hefty amount of damage.

A single Archer can refresh it, however should they miss, or should the enemy resist the DoT, then it leads to considerable downtime. This is why having all the Archers present use Bloodletter coordinated at the same time every time it needs to be refreshed is ideal, since it will generally guarantee the DoT sticks, and since overwriting a 0.5s Bloodletter DoT is negligable.

80 dmg unbuffed for Ogre is what I remember seeing (though I don't have a log in front of me, and I was usually buffing bloodletter since I was doing it in a BR and was under the impression that it also affected the dot/end damage at the time since I am new to Archer).

Unless bloodletter front end damage is better than skull sunder II/Foeseeker/Barrage/Quick Knock then I think one archer and possibly one other as a backup is all that should be doing bloodletter because otherwise you are wasting your TP on a weapon skill whose payoff is entirely on the backend/dot and cannot be stacked.

I think most of your groups' are "likely" using more than 2 archers since that is how many shells are running darkhold (not going to get into that debate on the archer forum, lol), it seems to me that keeping up bloodletter should be assigned and not randomly spammed by archers as I see it in most videos/pick ups I joined. Granted those groups do just fine, but again this is for the purpose of min/max discussion I'm not trying to insult anyone's group.

Originally Posted by carraway

We don't use Light Shot or Trifurcate in BRs (except for applying Defense Down, but we don't do that either, since it is really only observably beneficial when used before a perfect 8-person staggered BR).

I don't know whom you're referring to when you mention Bloodletter-spamming groups of Archers, but that's not something I recommend in my guide, nor is it something I practice.

Light Shot delay is dependent entirely on your bow delay (4.0s for Crab Bow); the displayed cooldown is a known bug (see Current Known Issues on Lodestone).

The 8 second delay for a basic BR that does not take advantage of the bulk of actual BR benefits is 8 seconds of DPS uptime taken away from every single participating player. Let me know how long it takes you to do a proper BR. All magic and weaponskills must be from a different class than the magic or weaponskill directly preceding it in order to really take advantage of a BR.

Again, I fully encourage you to try Deepvoid Slave with as many controlled factors as possible, with BRs and without BRs. Beyond that, I don't think I'm going to convince you of the efficacy of unadulterated DPS uptime, nor are you going to convince those of us who hold contrary beliefs to you that BRs are, in fact, the bee's knees.

Most JP pick up groups for Darkhold on my server don't use BR, so I'm familiar with it and its ability to still do good DPS. I can see the downside of BR if you have to wait for any amount of time, but I think a well coordinated BR removes this problem.

Still this is off topic, we've established that you guys aren't doing group BR's. Again I'm referring to using/equipping Cadence even for a solo BR. You said you guys don't do BR's so I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, but you said you tried cadence solo and found it not to be worth it (I thought from your post you were saying you did try it with trifurcate maybe I read it wrong).

Unless there is an upper limit, or a diminishing return on buffs you are buffing with Raging Strike II, Hawk's Eye, Ferocity II and getting (up to) 800 damage on Ogre you said with Trifcurcate. I'm suggesting that you instead try Raging Strike II, Cadence, Keen Flurry (better than Hawk's Eye), Ferocity II + Trifurcate in a solo BR and see if you can improve that even further. I'd think Keen Flurry would be a good replacement for Hawk's Eye, and Cadence would be a good replacement for at least one of your defensive abilities during the Ogre.

Furthermore if you coordinated your timers with another archer you could also get a phys. defense reduction BR doing this without otherwise interrupting your solo rotations. I also find that I get a higher TP return generally when part of a BR (though I'm not sure this is true solo or not), so there is that bonus as well.

Originally Posted by NoctisUmbra

Honestly, after 1.18a hit as an LS we ended up neglecting BRs as everyone was getting accustomed to the changes. It wasn't after we had already reached Batraal in the Darkhold that we decided to get back into BRs to speed our runs up and make everything better - and our runs have become much less consistent and efficient since then.

Part of this is likely due to rotation of LS members into the raid parties in a single night, thus reducing the efficiency of something as structural as a BR, but overall it comes with the liability of locking mages and archers into it - sometimes for too long. Overall I haven't noticed the kills being any faster either - at least not considerably. One can argue any gain in kill time can be attributed to us having become much more accustomed to 1.18.

I have noticed this too. Sometimes we get certain people in our group though who absolutely insist on BRs. On the other hand, it can also go smoothly with brs if everyone is in synch. But I do find that brs can create problems if every person is not on the same page or if just one person is slow.

I see the Bloodletter staggering as well. Heck, I do it on occasion lol. Sometimes it just happens, especially when your group keeps swapping out a lot of people as some leave or some want in. Personally I try to keep Bloodletter and Skull Sunder II up. I really wish they would give those 2 weapon skills different status icons though. Sometimes I have to guess which one is active, gets even more difficult to tell if you have multiple people with both WS set.