helping bard with playing Army's Paeon

in reply to Rinchan (cause character limits are the devil)

invigorate is what 90 seconds? 120 seconds? and you're comparing it to aetherflow (which is god tier) 60 seconds and it gives you 20% mana back where as invig gives 400 tp and 500 on drg BUT drg have higher costs on most their attacks, almost evrything they use consumes more TP than the natural regen, monk's who have 420 skill speed last about 4 minutes before they start having TP problems, at 5 minutes they are complately starved.

goad sounds like it's a single target thing and seems good BUT it still brings up the problem of it is less efficient to ask for TP than to let us see it in party list, and if you give me the whole it helps you see stuff YOU CAN'T SEE SHIT IN THE LITTLE SLITS WHERE A BAR COULD BE CAUSE THE (DE)BUFFS TAKE UP 75% OF THAT SPACE.

saying that a monk or a dragoon should just drop part of their rotation (like DoTs which smn proves is OP) is basically saying that we should just have 4 casters and a bard for foes dps increase to the max. or have 2 bards for alternating foes and 3 casters. something i should point out is it's ONLY and 10% magic res decrease, essentially a 5-10% damage buff for about 45-60 seconds which yes is good but realistically it will take you 2 minutes or so to get that all back and if you use a paeon's for about 30 seconds just till invigorate you've only reduced your damage by 20% for 30 seconds while keeping your melee at 450+ and then can switch to foes for 30 seconds.
what i'm asking is help for others as well as myself so that i can better increase the efficiency of my support abilities.

Let's take this 30 seconds of paeon sample size. That is 300 TP. So you think that reducing BRD DPS by 20% for 30s and not increasing caster DPS by 15% (non-BV foe's) during this time is better for raid damage than a DRG just cutting out Phlebotomize 3 times (270 TP) or a MNK cutting out Touch of Death 3 or 4 times (240 or 320 TP)?

This is dependent on group config, of course If you have no caster DPS then I suppose Paeon is better for raid damage.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RinchanNau

Let's take this 30 seconds of paeon sample size. That is 300 TP. So you think that reducing BRD DPS by 20% for 30s and not increasing caster DPS by 15% (non-BV foe's) during this time is better for raid damage than a DRG just cutting out Phlebotomize 3 times (270 TP) or a MNK cutting out Touch of Death 3 or 4 times (240 or 320 TP)?

This is dependent on group config, of course If you have no caster DPS then I suppose Paeon is better for raid damage.

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Its a little bit disingenious of you to compare TP usage without taking into account the natural tp regen.
If you want to compare based on phlebotomize or touch of death it should really be ~9-10 phlebotomizes or 14-15 touch of death's we're talking about here compared to the 30 seconds of Paeon the bard would be playing (give or take 1 or 2 depending on skill speed).

Not true at all. Where do you get that from? All you do is leave 2-3s of auto attack where one of those high TP consumption attacks would have been. It really isn't that challenging. I can assure you that.

So based on your post, in your parties you usually have a drg OR mnk and not both. So in your instance I guess it would be more efficient for the drg or mnk to manage their tp.

In my parties we usually have 1 tank,. 2 casters, 1 bard, 2 melee (both drg and mnk) and 2 healers. In this configuration it is more efficient to play paeon when the melee dps and are low on tp because they are usually your highest dps. If both of them drop from 450+ to 200 that is less efficient for the raid group than the brd eating 20% damage cut and the casters not getting a 15 % damage boost for a period of time (30 sec to help until next invigorate sample size). No matter how hard the brd and casters push in that situation they can not make up the difference that the 2 melee dps are suffering from by not having paeon and being low on tp.

lol keeping foes up longer for more caster damage
and avoiding using Paeon for bard

FAR outweighs the dps loss by melee tweaking rotation to manage tp better.

Truth is...
If bards played other classes they'd know when to sing Paeon without people asking just by seeing what other DPS are doing and how long the fight/pulls are taking.


I just leveled up bard to 50 as my last DoW/DoM class and the 4 or 5 times i sang Army's Paeon on dungeons while leveling up, i had either tank or the DRG/MNK thanking me for using it because they really needed it on the medium/big pulls.

I know there's a huge difference between dungeons and t8, but that's the exact purpose of the dungeons: for you to learn how to play your job properly and hopefully to it's fullest potential.


Unfortunately that's not usually the case. Most bards don't even keep their DoTs up for god's sake.
I've joined some statics for t6 and t7 where the bard never used DoTs. Same for Ramuh EX. They just heavy shot all adds and think that's a good way to play. This... baffles me.

(Typical bard: Stack raging strikes, Blood for Blood, Hawk's Eye and Barrage as soon as the tank pull - or sometimes even before the pull, wasting precious seconds of the buffs - and then spam Heavy Shot all fight long, occasionally using Straight Shot if it's flashing or Bloodletter/Blunt arrow if it's up)

This is not true in the party set up I posted.

say the party composition is 1 tank, 2 melee, 1 brd and 2 casters and healers.
For s#&$s and giggles let's say all the damage dealers are at 450 dps.

your two melee dps are starved for tp. The drop from 450 to 200. That's 500 dps just between the two of them. Over 30 second ( time period) until both of their next invigorates.

That's 15,000 points of damage lost just between the two of them in just 30 seconds.

The bard plays paeon instead of letting the melee run dry for 30 seconds. Let's say that's minus 15% damage from both casters (which it more than likely isn't that high).

With the paeon up the go from 450 dps to 382.5, and let's just round down to 382 even. That's 136 dps lost between just the two casters. Laughable compared to the 500 just the two melee together are loosing.

Let's add the brds loss of 20%. They drop from 450 to 310.

Sow now between 3 different dps the are loosing 226 dps. Still less than half what the melee dps are loosing for a total of 6,780 damage over 30 seconds.

The dps loss difference by not feeding the melee tp is over 8000 in damage. That's just in 30 seconds.

Managing tp doesn't help when you are out of tp, then telling melee to just cut back their rotations because you don't want to cast paeon isn't the greatest idea. You might as well bring all casters instead and get the most out of you foes req that you can and not just invite melee to just limit break.

GOOD melee dps players have a lot to bring to the party and should not be ignored. Most good melee dps don't ask for help with tp unless they foresee themselves in trouble tp wise.

On top of that if you have a war main tank, your helping him/her with keeping hate.

Just throw melee dps a bone every now and then.

like i said is it really that much trouble for a TP bar to exist? it doesn't have any sort of disadvantages and frankly it will help people be better on the support side of bard.

on the topic of me knowing other classes. when you're doing T8 and you're managing callouts, homing missile, looking at the healer's MP, checking your buffs/dot timers, making sure that the towers were pushed correctly *takes a breath* i'm sorry for not noticing exactly how many phlebotomizes and touch of deaths were used as well as factoring in the fact that a lot of the skills drg and mnk use tend to actually cost more than the regen does (at least for monks it does over time) between all that ;).

like you said dungeons aren't raids, although i learnt how to play my job by paying attention to what i was doing, reading my skills and seeing what the optimum amount of damage i can get is, pretty much all dungeons aren't mechanics heavy. which is a shame as there are A LOT of bad dps out there :\

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RinchanNau

Let's take this 30 seconds of paeon sample size. That is 300 TP. So you think that reducing BRD DPS by 20% for 30s and not increasing caster DPS by 15% (non-BV foe's) during this time is better for raid damage than a DRG just cutting out Phlebotomize 3 times (270 TP) or a MNK cutting out Touch of Death 3 or 4 times (240 or 320 TP)?

This is dependent on group config, of course If you have no caster DPS then I suppose Paeon is better for raid damage.

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my my it would seem someone isn't actually thinking about the fact that:
A) dragoon's have about 3-4 skills that don't actually cost more than 60 tp and they are usually combo skills which means you saying they should just cut out phlebotomize actually doesn't help them because in order for them to do damage they need to keep consuming TP and 2-3 seconds of autos is literally like one auto attack and it's also 2-3 seconds where they could have been doing damage.

B) if you can direct me to a monk who has no skill speed and still pushes 430+ dps i'd like to meet that guy and ask him how in the blazing hells did he even manage to do that. because as far as i can tell monks have low tp costs sure but that means nothing when you factor in that at greased lightning 3 they are beating the natural tp regen you get every 2.5 seconds because their cooldowns are actually closer to about 1.7 or so. so same problem as drg sure they can just take out touch of death but that doesn't adress the issue and since they NEED to keep greased lightning up that 2-3 seconds of auto's will most likely become 2 skills in their rotation which just makes them lose more TP

as a bard i know that my tp isn't actually much of an issue, i can very easily manage till the next invig and still be ok because simply put my DPS drop from not maximizing my DoT timers so they get continued buffed damage amounts to about 40-60 dps but having played drg for a spell and knowing a lot of monk friends who i have practically interrogated in order to know their classes. it would do a lot more good to help me help them by letting me see when they need TP before it becomes an issue.

As it stands right now I only play TP song when I am completely out of TP myself since I cannot see other peoples TP bars and I only play it when a more important song is not needed. As for the mana issue regarding leaving myself short when another song is needed, I do not consider it much of an issue as I have yet to have a problem with such and it is very easy to pop an MP regen potion to restore a reasonable amount of MP. I will point out though I am still working on getting my cross class skills up of which when have done so TP will be less of an issue.