SB Bard Changes: Good or Bad? Thoughts?

[SugarBunz]

Heyo! Lvl70 BRD and ilvl309.

Would love to know how stats are weighed as I’m looking into melds very soon, also a lil help on rotations will be appreciated.

That being said, I love Pitch Perfect, I’ve been told to use it on 2 stacks and not wait for 3. Barrage+Refulgent always for me

I was actually just thinking about this today. Using perfect pitch on every two stacks instead of waiting for the three.

[Furious]

I was actually just thinking about this today. Using perfect pitch on every two stacks instead of waiting for the three.

It's a bit difficult to work out the relative value of doing this or waiting for three, and it depends a lot on your crit chance. We're not actually interested in the direct value of a single stack or a single shot, we're interested in the total value of the stacks you can generate throughout the duration of the song. The chance to lose a stack when going from 2 stacks up to 3 based solely on the fact that both dots crit at the same time is almost exactly crit chance^2; at 25% crit, we would lose ~6.25% of our total stacks over time when going from 2 to 3 stacks. As crit goes up, the number of stacks lost this way goes up and so does the number of 2 stacks that become 3 for "free" when you only go to 2 stacks before using.

However, the gain per stack is a lot higher than 6.25%, so I think it would take a relatively high crit chance to make it worth sitting on 2 stacks overall. The value per stack when going from 2 to 3 goes from 120potency to 140, which is a gain of ~15% damage per stack. There is some overhead loss that brings this number down a bit (you would sometimes have to use a 1 stack at the end of the song after using a 3stack, when you would have done 2:2), but the overhead isn't that large.

Broadly speaking, as long as you can always use pitch perfect within the window of a single dot tick from proccing (ie: use the 3 stacks before the following dot tick from it proccing), it's going to always be the right choice to wait for 3 stacks until absurdly high crit chance.