Best bow for ARC/BRD

[Lamentor]

Dzian, thinking about it, the delay between say, ifrit's bow with a delay of 4.3s, and say, Verdant Shortbow with a delay of 3.5 seconds (.8 seconds less) is a huge difference. accounting for lag, if you're spamming as fast as you can, you can essentially have a 2.5 second delay period between a WS and a light shot. So the fact that you are able to cut .8 seconds off of each light shot essentially cuts the time between WS's down significantly, thus causing more WS and light shot spam, and potentially more damage overall.

It really comes down to speed vs power. And of course, the fight matters a lot as well. So I might have to extend any research I do to specific fights/spiritbond parties/etc., since I might get different results depending on the situation.

[Dzian]

So the fact that you are able to cut .8 seconds off of each light shot essentially cuts the time between WS's down significantly, thus causing more WS and light shot spam, and potentially more damage overall.

my point was kinda that it wouldnt work like that. i keep every weapon skill on a timer and spam my 10 second abilities (gloom arrow, heavy shot) between combos. weapons play no impact on timers. no matter which bow i equip for example pericing arrow is always going to be 20 second recast. so more light shots doesn't mean more ws spam.

0.8 seconds is quite alot of time but its typically in that 0.8 seconds i use those 10s skills so much. but as the weapon delay doesnt affect weapon skill times it doesnt really speed up your combos any. maybe the inbetween lightshots will make the whole combo a second faster but it'd take a lot of extra light shots to compensate for the reduced damage and at present there just isnt time to get them in.

you could squeeze 2 lightshots between skills in an attempt to increase damage but at the same as your trying to increase damage one way you're also decreasing damage another by slowing down skill use effectively using less skills over time and thus less damage over time.

[Enfarious]

my point was kinda that it wouldnt work like that. i keep every weapon skill on a timer and spam my 10 second abilities (gloom arrow, heavy shot) between combos. weapons play no impact on timers. no matter which bow i equip for example pericing arrow is always going to be 20 second recast. so more light shots doesn't mean more ws spam.

0.8 seconds is quite alot of time but its typically in that 0.8 seconds i use those 10s skills so much. but as the weapon delay doesnt affect weapon skill times it doesnt really speed up your combos any. maybe the inbetween lightshots will make the whole combo a second faster but it'd take a lot of extra light shots to compensate for the reduced damage and at present there just isnt time to get them in.

you could squeeze 2 lightshots between skills in an attempt to increase damage but at the same as your trying to increase damage one way you're also decreasing damage another by slowing down skill use effectively using less skills over time and thus less damage over time.

0.8 seconds may have more impact than you think, if your keeping everything on cool down then after a full spam there's ~5 seconds of no abils available, in that 5 seconds you can get 2 light shots or 1, this happens every 10 seconds, so every 10 seconds your sacrificing 1 light shot in order to have 10 more dmg for WS modifiers. In a fight that lasts 8mins, this works out to 48 shots difference going from 2.5 to 3.3 delay.

[Dzian]

0.8 seconds may have more impact than you think, if your keeping everything on cool down then after a full spam there's ~5 seconds of no abils available, in that 5 seconds you can get 2 light shots or 1, this happens every 10 seconds, so every 10 seconds your sacrificing 1 light shot in order to have 10 more dmg for WS modifiers. In a fight that lasts 8mins, this works out to 48 shots difference going from 2.5 to 3.3 delay.

I dunno because even if you keep your 2steps and 3steps on cool down theres still your gloom arrow and heavy shot which you can pop off cos they both have 10 second recast. so in that 5 second window its easily possible to pop 1 or both of those skills which is essentially the same as popping 1 or 2 extra lightshots in that 5 second window...

now looking at some old parses (couple on blog and ls site) on average i put out 20 shots a minute with my ifrit bow. that includes time casting buffs and songs, now a couple of friends with garudas bow have said it's pretty difficult to put out more shots than that using a garudas bow even with its reduced delay. because by taking advantage of the faster light shot means your popping abilities slower. so where in a minute you may get 2 or 3 more light shots out you end up putting out 2 or 3 less skills.

it ends up that you put out a similar number of hits over time with a bow that has about 75% of the ifrits bows damage

[NoctisUmbra]

I dunno because even if you keep your 2steps and 3steps on cool down theres still your gloom arrow and heavy shot which you can pop off cos they both have 10 second recast. so in that 5 second window its easily possible to pop 1 or both of those skills which is essentially the same as popping 1 or 2 extra lightshots in that 5 second window...

now looking at some old parses (couple on blog and ls site) on average i put out 20 shots a minute with my ifrit bow. that includes time casting buffs and songs, now a couple of friends with garudas bow have said it's pretty difficult to put out more shots than that using a garudas bow even with its reduced delay. because by taking advantage of the faster light shot means your popping abilities slower. so where in a minute you may get 2 or 3 more light shots out you end up putting out 2 or 3 less skills.

it ends up that you put out a similar number of hits over time with a bow that has about 75% of the ifrits bows damage

Depends on the player I guess, since I;ve had no trouble keeping LS on cooldown any time I wasnt casting something. I made a LS macro to spam with my gamepad just for this purpose. Between almost every WS I set off a Light Shot. Burning down Garuda was a very good place to compare DPS, and my total damage went up by 1.5-2k just after I adapted to the Gardua's Spine.