The Artemis Bow.

[pandabearcat]

You DO understand how Bards DPS works right? It's almost entirely based on Procs. Skill Speed only really helps to apply the DoTs in the first place, not to actually make them hit critical and reset Bloodletter. For Bards Skill Speed is almost useless compared to Critical Chance.

Mugsan I don't think you understand how bard dps works.

At the MOST, if your bloodletters procced every single oGCD (which btw, can't happen, you'll drop off after 7 BLs), at MOST Bloodletters will be 50% of your damage, not even counting DoTs. If you count DoTs its <35% or so of your damage, even if it procced every single time.

The fact is that bloodletter isn't as good as you think it is.

It scales...almost (almost being key here) linearly with crit rate. There is no exponential scaling here, or anything to that effect. In fact if anything, it scales (RoB procs that is) logarithmically while total BLs scales linearly with crit.

Crit is...OKAY, it is bolstered by RoB procs certainly, but besides that it is only "okay". Bards do value crit more than some classes, but because of Bard's extremely low base weapon damage, determination tends to be a bit better because it is a flat increase to all your damage, independent of WD and Dex.

So as you get more Dex, WD, and Det, crit becomes more valuable.

But even then, you vastly overestimate BL's contribution to your damage.

Look here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...d-Crit-and-RoB

1% crit increases the number of BL procs you get by slightly more than 1, in six minutes. That is a MINISCULE difference in dps for 1% crit.

EDIT: With all that being said, crit is nice, but not the greatest thing ever.

Det is nice too, about even with crit.

SS is still bad, but its not going to somehow lower your dps.

And people forget the best thing about the artemis bow: it looks awesome, has an awesome animation, and does very satisfying click click click as it unfolds.