Is bard dps the weakest?

[Viridiana]

Why is the summoner's fester ability only cast 3 times? Isn't it on a 10 sec CD for 6 casts in a minute?

Those are actually the numbers you took from poster tn2389. I'm assuming, though, that it's because it requires you to be under the effect of Aetherflow, which only stacks to 3, and has a 1 minute recast.

Edit: Which kinda brings up a second point. If the SMN is pre-casting three Aetherflow casts, it seems like the BRD should get some sort of buff just to make things. . .well, not even, because they're honestly already even if I factor in my critical %. Maybe I should leave BRD unbuffed to give the illusion of equality.

Edit to the edit: Just looked at the actual Aetherflow skill. Guess at 40+ it gives 3 stacks of Aetherflow in one cast, so nevermind the whole thing about pre-casting.

[savant07]

Does your bard math include trait damage bonus?

[Melopahn]

Bards are the strongest for multiple reasons. High (very high) damage, River of Blood is stupidly high damage, all our personal buffs are great and amazing damage, we couple white hits with out abilites which casters do no.
Basically if bards don't sing a song they are untouchable high DPS, and when they do sing everyone can catch up but they are still not as awesome as a bard because they aren't singing a lovely song thats making everyone else perform better.

[Viridiana]

Does your bard math include trait damage bonus?

It's based off of my actual damage numbers, so yeah. I'm wearing *slightly* better gear than the SMN you quoted, in that I have 4 darklight pieces, 3 ilvl 55 greens (including weapon), and the rest ilvl 60 greens. But the one extra piece of darklight isn't enough to account for the actual difference in damage.

[savant07]

It's based off of my actual damage numbers, so yeah. I'm wearing *slightly* better gear than the SMN you quoted, in that I have 4 darklight pieces, 3 ilvl 55 greens (including weapon), and the rest ilvl 60 greens. But the one extra piece of darklight isn't enough to account for the actual difference in damage.

Hmm I'm guessing this doesn't factor in any of our 5 DPS cooldowns.

Also, how often do you think River of Blood procs and the average Bloodletter cooldown you think it brings it to?

[Viridiana]

Hmm I'm guessing this doesn't factor in any of our 5 DPS cooldowns.

Also, how often do you think River of Blood procs and the average Bloodletter cooldown you think it brings it to?

It depends on what buffs you have active when you use the Bites. Using only SS and passive crit chance, I usually have it come up early (sometimes only barely, though). Conversely, SS+Internal Release+Passive has caused every DOT tic to reset the CD before, and I've seen this happen multiple times.

As for the cooldowns, I didn't include any. Partially because the numbers you quoted didn't, and partially because I'm lazy and it was all done while alt-tabbed or waiting on rez sickness in AK. >_>

[savant07]

It depends on what buffs you have active when you use the Bites. Using only SS and passive crit chance, I usually have it come up early (sometimes only barely, though). Conversely, SS+Internal Release+Passive has caused every DOT tic to reset the CD before, and I've seen this happen multiple times.

As for the cooldowns, I didn't include any. Partially because the numbers you quoted didn't, and partially because I'm lazy and it was all done while alt-tabbed or waiting on rez sickness in AK. >_>

Hmm, wonder how well we scale with gear in terms of crit chance and resetting blood letters. I wish DoTs ticked per second :P When I play my bard, I feel like the reset isn't proccing enough

Also, if you DoT multiple mobs, does it help increase the procs?

[ChanceSkeleton]

The procs on River of Blood is pretty inconsistent. From my own experience, sometimes I can go the full 18s without a proc and sometimes it procs 4 times on one windbite/venomous. I'm not really sure if there is any rhyme or reason to it.

[Rainsford]

There's a lot of problems with that "SMN DPS calculation". It assumes that the SMN instantly has up all DOTs, when it takes 15s at minimum to get every DoT up. You also can't cast Fester until at least 7.5 seconds in. The damage calculations also assume that you instantly reapply every DoT as soon as it wears off which, in practice, is nearly impossible to do thanks to latency, staggered durations, etc. So unless you summon your SMN whenever a dot gets close to falling off, you're going to be missing a chunk of that dps.

Also, because pets don't scale with gear, the "100 potency dot" of a pet is actually far lower proportionally once your SMN starts gearing up, meaning that the difference between an item level 90 BRD and SMN will be even greater in favor of the BRD.

Can you clear all content with a competent SMN? Sure, probably. But BRD hits harder and can be played lazier while still getting better results than a skilled SMN.

[Viridiana]

As far as I know, yeah, DOT'ing multiple mobs increases the chances it will proc, but bear in mind that it can never proc more than once per 3 seconds, as all DOTs are on the same 3 second timer. I usually find it easier to just focus fire whatever the tank wants me to kill, and to heck with DOTing anything else before it's time to switch.

As far as procs go, just keeping up SS buff and your passive crit chance should be giving you about 3-4 procs per minute, which means you're doubling your use of BL. Using my figures above, that's an extra 570-760 damage a minute, and that number shoots up if you pop Internal Release and re-apply the DOTs. (And honestly, I'm assuming about 10% crit chance unbuffed, but I'll be downloading the parser soon to get a look.)

Edit:

Also, because pets don't scale with gear, the "100 potency dot" of a pet is actually far lower proportionally once your SMN starts gearing up, meaning that the difference between an item level 90 BRD and SMN will be even greater in favor of the BRD.

Pets do scale with gear, you just have to re-summon them. The scaling sucks, from what the forums say, but it is there. . .