Best bow for ARC/BRD

[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.

[Enfarious]

Garuda's Spine wins for BRD. Sure, ARC/BRD damage is significantly Light Shots, and although they may hit a bit less with the Spine than with Ifrit's, you can throw them out more often. The DPS value speaks for Light Shot damage as well in the sense that doing nothing but LS on every cooldown you'd do higher DPS than with Ifrit's. Being that the DPS value is higher on the Spine, you also do greater damage on weapon skills with the Spine.

Overall I don't see the Spine being beater by any bow on BRD due to the magnitude at which DPS effects damage done compared to other stats/atributes.

It's also for this very reason, DPS, that Sarnga +1 is best for ARC.

The DPS value is only a reflection of dmg/delay for the possible (@100% hit rate) dmg it can do. It's not what it will do, and for any calculation it's the damage value not the DPS that is taken into account.
That's not to say that higher DPS doesn't mean anything, it gives an idea of the dmg that will be done by your LSs and AAs, which do play a significant role in anyone final DPS.

[NoctisUmbra]

The DPS value is only a reflection of dmg/delay for the possible (@100% hit rate) dmg it can do. It's not what it will do, and for any calculation it's the damage value not the DPS that is taken into account.
That's not to say that higher DPS doesn't mean anything, it gives an idea of the dmg that will be done by your LSs and AAs, which do play a significant role in anyone final DPS.

Actually, its been determined that the DPS value of a weapon is what determines the strength of weapon skills as well as the caps of attributes on weapon skills. The Damage value determines the strength and attribute caps for Auto Attack damage, and thus the DPS value indirectly gives you an idea of whether you will be putting out more or less damage with your AA alone on the long run. Especially in the case of ARC/BRD who can manually control the pace of Light Shot and keep it on cool down as opposed to other DoW that suffer delays to their AA when using weapon skills, the DPS value means a lot.

[Akira]

from what i can see ifrits bow does better damage then garudas spine easily, i always parse higher with ifrits bow then i did with garudas spine

[Enfarious]

Actually, its been determined that the DPS value of a weapon is what determines the strength of weapon skills as well as the caps of attributes on weapon skills. The Damage value determines the strength and attribute caps for Auto Attack damage, and thus the DPS value indirectly gives you an idea of whether you will be putting out more or less damage with your AA alone on the long run. Especially in the case of ARC/BRD who can manually control the pace of Light Shot and keep it on cool down as opposed to other DoW that suffer delays to their AA when using weapon skills, the DPS value means a lot.

Really, I'd like to see where that determination was made, it's incredibly hard to believe that they're using DPS for dmg base on WSs, seeing as DPS is simply dmg/delay. Show me the formulas that people have come up with.
AA on other classes/jobs actually doesn't get stopped by weaponskills, it gets queued so that as soon as your WS completes an AA will happen if the timer is down, it works out the same as being able to manually hit LS, check it out sometime. If I hit WSs so fast on DRG that I don't get to AA between them, I'd also be hitting them so fast as to not be able to squeeze in a LS, if I pause on DRG for .5 secs between AAs still happen between each skill, assuming the delay is down, I just don't have to hit a button.
But that's not really the point of this thread.
Grab the bows, assuming you've got them, fight equal leveled mobs, which is to say all mobs are 55 or 53 or 52 for 50 of each WS on each bow, check the numbers yourself. WS dmg scales with the dmg value, not the DPS value. I of course didn't test this with bows, but the math is the same no matter the weapon type.

[NoctisUmbra]

Really, I'd like to see where that determination was made, it's incredibly hard to believe that they're using DPS for dmg base on WSs, seeing as DPS is simply dmg/delay. Show me the formulas that people have come up with.
AA on other classes/jobs actually doesn't get stopped by weaponskills, it gets queued so that as soon as your WS completes an AA will happen if the timer is down, it works out the same as being able to manually hit LS, check it out sometime. If I hit WSs so fast on DRG that I don't get to AA between them, I'd also be hitting them so fast as to not be able to squeeze in a LS, if I pause on DRG for .5 secs between AAs still happen between each skill, assuming the delay is down, I just don't have to hit a button.
But that's not really the point of this thread.
Grab the bows, assuming you've got them, fight equal leveled mobs, which is to say all mobs are 55 or 53 or 52 for 50 of each WS on each bow, check the numbers yourself. WS dmg scales with the dmg value, not the DPS value. I of course didn't test this with bows, but the math is the same no matter the weapon type.

I have both bows. I tested both bows. WS damage is higher on Spine. Let me find the quote from the initial testing just for you, since you apparently don't keep up. I'll edit this in a sec.

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/107...=1#post5196311

Enjoy:

So t recap what this test was, I took an R50 ARC and made sure to hit the stat caps at 334PIE/303DEX. I then switched weapons around for different base damage / delays / levels by choosing different bows and arrows. Some bows had extra ATK bonuses so I used gorgets to balance ATK at static 511. For these tests, I will analyze the results as if the PIE/DEX stat caps have been reached in every case.

Here's my prelim data set:
http://imgbox.com/aawk6uhA

Some of the 'dev' ranges weren't near 8.0% but I felt this is a pretty good data set to eyeball general trends off of.

A lot of your initial thoughts turned out to be spot on. To go over a couple of key points I took out of this:

(1) Auto-Attack / Light Shot seems to be based on the base damage
Being able to play around with both the weapon and arrow combos made it possible to test what happened to light shot if the base damage was the same, but the level of the weapon and the DPS/delay was different. In separate 2 comparisons (one at base 72, other at base 106), the auto-attack damage was the same despite differences in DPS, delay, and level of the weapon. Note that the WS damage on Wide Volley did change. The left chart is a simple plot that shows the relationship between base damage and damage dealt by light shot when stats are capped. I did not force it to intercept 0 just to see how close it would be (it was pretty damn close).

(2) Weapon Skill damage appears to be based on DPS.
Couple things here. First off, when you plot DPS vs. damage dealt by wide volley (curve at the bottom right), you get an incredibly nice linear curve with an intercept very close to 0. This gives very strong evidence that the "DPS" calculated value is the major variable that determines the WS stat caps. We can also remove level of the weapon as a variable because when comparing trial 2 vs. trial 3, Wide Volley damage was higher with a lower level weapon. I think the prelim data set is pretty convincing - DPS is the main modifier for the WS stat caps.

I think the biggest question now is how do the stat caps change with increasing base damage for auto-attack and DPS for WSs. We could brute force our way to the answer by simply running a series of large scale tests similar to Seiken's; however, I think we can save ourselves some time. The curves were very linear. If we can find the "per point increase in damage per +1 stat", we can back calculate the stat caps. I'll try to think of a test methodology for this.

Another question is if all WSs have the same cap. This would take a bit more testing though. From eyeballing, it seems like it should. I remember talking to Valk a couple weeks ago and he noted that all WSs seem to follow similar patterns while auto-attack is separate.

Last question I would offer up is what happens in these scenarios if the stats are NOT capped? Does a higher base damage weapon become more favorable if stats cannot be capped? As your DPS value rises, it becomes more and more difficult to cap stats. Is it worth pushing "DPS" on the weapon if you cannot cap the relevant stats (or require sacrificing too much ATK to do so)?

****

Thinking ahead to how this information can be used to min-max in actual in-game scenarios...

I think the focus of weapon selection should shift towards DPS for melee jobs. The vast majority of your total melee damage comes from WS damage. The only possible exception to this is ARC/BRD, which deals a significant amount of damage output from Light Shot (which includes Barrage). You can potentially make the case for prioritizing Base Damage for ARC/BRD. If we exclude the ARC argument for now, this makes Garuda weapons followed by GC weapons the 2 best options for damage output.

Let me know if you have any critique or thoughts! Pretty interesting stuff that really changes the way we'll be thinking about melee min-maxing.

[Enfarious]

Nope I hadn't seen that prior to now. After reading it, I find that there's still alot of questions being asked, but I'll take it for what it's worth for now.
Thanks for the link I usually don't follow every forum out there because alot of it just gets repeated here anyway.

[NoctisUmbra]

Yup, and as you can see that's over 2 weeks old. Since then it's become apparent that even when the caps are not necessarily met, the DPS value is already the most potent stat in determining WS damage and therefore increasing DPS alone on weapon is a prudent investment.

My argument for Light Shot in the case of Garuda vs Ifrit is that although the Damage on Garuda is lower, the delay is lower to a greater extent. So while your individual LS will hit for less, the rate at which you fire is not just proportionally faster, but much faster allowing your total damage from Light Shots to increase as well.

The only skills that are less effective for picking Garuda's Spine over Ifrit's Bow on the long run are Barrage and Quick Nock... however for BRD Quick Nock is not very often used at all due to it's cooldown and lack of Keen Flurry. Personally, I feel like the overall increase in damage from every WS as well as overall damage increase from Light Shots in the long run outweigh the decrease in damage on Barrage, and my testing proves me this with my damage output/DPS increasing ever since obtaining and properly using Garuda's Spine.

I will say however, being that it is a lower delay bow, it requires more on-hands management and may have a bit of a learning curve. Like I said before, I made a Light Shot Macro to hit between weaponskills to keep the CD on LS without having to move across my action bar from LS to WS to LS... (gamepad).

[Enfarious]

I did that w/ light shot also, use a PS3 controller, so moving back and forth between every shot isn't really the most efficient method. I also use very few macros on arc/brd for now, I haven't hit 50 yet, maybe I'll use more then. For now though using a /shot /wait /shot for 5 shots per press is decent, it's almost an AA.

This whole bit w/ DPS being the important stat is incredibly counter-intuitive, maybe that's just because of years of the base dmg value being the most important in XI, but I'll adapt.

[NoctisUmbra]

I did that w/ light shot also, use a PS3 controller, so moving back and forth between every shot isn't really the most efficient method. I also use very few macros on arc/brd for now, I haven't hit 50 yet, maybe I'll use more then. For now though using a /shot /wait /shot for 5 shots per press is decent, it's almost an AA.

This whole bit w/ DPS being the important stat is incredibly counter-intuitive, maybe that's just because of years of the base dmg value being the most important in XI, but I'll adapt.

I find that it makes sense in my opinion. If it were simply base damage, then there would be no reason to ever use low delay weapons the way everything else works in game. The Damage is balanced by the delay ONLY for AA. In the case of WS, they have their own cooldowns and TP limitations to keep them in check and thus are unaffected by delay directly in any way, so lower delay weapons would have very soft hitting WS which would result in them being incredibly inferior. This is in fact the reason why everyone thought the Garuda weapons would be crap when their stats were first revealed.

DPS however gives a solid measure of how much damage the weapons will put out compared to others with AA, and by making it so it is the primary stat that effects WS damage it becomes consistent. This way, one can chose high delay/high damage weapons, such as the GC and HDcraft weapons, or low delay/low damage weapons based on personal preference.