Bard Skill Rotation?

I didn't have time to actually figure out a good skill rotation for Bard, as I was focused on my Tanking Classes and White Mage. Anybody care to share if there is one available, or a guide in general?

Would really appreciate it :)

I regret not taking a snapshot of Majidah's Bard Sucks thread in the Beta forums before that forum suffered Bahamut's wrath.

There are some minor adjustments too, such as Hawk's Eye boosting Dexterity that may worm their way into the rotation.

I suspect Majidah can provide more feedback once there's some downtime. Prior to target dummy testing, will probably go with the following.

Things that I would want to do are:
Prioritize using Misery's End and Bloodletter (attacks that are mostly independent of the global cooldown).

And I say Misery's End, because that ability can only be used when the enemy is about to die, so I would that ability go on cooldown first before my Bloodletter.

Use Straight Shot before Venomous Bite and Windbite to promote critical rate procs. [Pugilist's Internal Release may be used before the two DoTs]
Keep Venomous Bite and Windbite up on a target to assist in proc'ing Bloodletter.
Use Rain of Death to mitigate damage tank receives once all enemies have a red name (meaning tank or another has enmity on them).


Will need to feel out for when to weave Hawk's Eye, Raging Strike, Blood for Blood, Barrage, and Internal Release based on the flow of battle.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TirionCrey

I didn't have time to actually figure out a good skill rotation for Bard, as I was focused on my Tanking Classes and White Mage. Anybody care to share if there is one available, or a guide in general?

Would really appreciate it :)

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this is what i learned form lvl 35 and can vary at 50

Open rotation.

Straight shot (to get the 10% crit buff up)
Bloodletter
Venomous Bite
Wind Bite
Heavy shot

Skill Priority:
Bloodletter
Dots (Venomous Bite and wind Bite)
Straight shot (only on procs or if buff is going to run out)
Heavy shot

Under 20% misery's end is priority 1

for leveling up to 20 i was able to get much of this in a macro, just pulling straight shot and the dots out for their own buttons to refresh them as needed or on procs.

It's not much of a rotation; rather, it's more of a prioritization system based on maintaining debuffs, buffs, and taking advantage of procs as they occur.

Here's a fairly technical question that someone may or may not have done any testing for yet:

Do effects such as dots from venomous bite and windbite "snapshot" your stats upon application, or do they update dynamically as you receive buffs?

Edit: Got the answer. They do in fact snapshot your stats on application.

At the moment, I have a macro for a simple rotation. Misery's End > Bloodletter> Heavy Shot. It helps to not worry about using ME and BL on cooldown (or when available). As said above, I used Straight Shot when proc or rebuff, venomous bite when it wore off (though some time it's hard to notice when the mob has two full rows of debuffs).