Bard: Dps check and Mage's Ballad

[HewieAlbino]

***Deleted***

[EdgeFayth]

It's much more a matter of bad people dying stupidly or bad healer... Not a problem of brd song.
You are not supposed to play any mana song before - during adds phase. Ask your group to dodge more efficiently-clear the thunder orbs to reduce damages taken.

[SlyRoyale]

What Fayth said. The song isn't the issue, but rather the rest of the people you were playing with. If a group needs to you sing Mage's Ballad or Army's Paeon during a DPS check, they need to step it up. Mage's Ballad is to help give the healers breathing room for recovering from mistakes, and Paeon for preventing your physical DPS from becoming TP-starved later on in the fight. Treat every time to sing a song on a case-by-case basis. Usually, the best time to sing Ballad and Paeon is when it's not during a DPS check. That way, your healers and physical DPS won't be in a pinch during those checks.

[Sessurea]

Sounds like way too much avoidable damage was not avoided, bad stacking in ramuh is pure rape. Yeah above said it well here, you really want a smooth start to the arbiter phase. Tanks dying from not gettings orbs, dps overlapping thunder, or chaotic not being cleansed ; the problems should be ironed out in order to have a decent chance of a clear, and will present the best conditions for arbiters and w/o brink of death debuff and healers mp zapped.

As bard I hang out at the very south of arena in order to be chaotic victim 100% of the time. This means I have the biggest dps downtime, and if I had to ballad, it's dps penalty would affect me least due to my downtime from chaotic. I really prefer to foe and battle voice arbiters but in current gear mp song should be fine too if needed.

Also, never done ramuh myself with team speak, but I hear many people saying it's tons easier with it. The marking system is completely fine of course, but ramuh pug learning parties....been there done that and it aint pretty.

[Ooshima]

In any case, as a bard your priority is Mage's Ballad. In any instance that you are running, there will be learning period where you won't clear it in those runs. Even for the top groups that achieved top 10 world clears, they don't happen to one-shot the instance.

People die and make mistakes during learning periods. The group's aim in these times is to stay alive keep the fight up as long as possible. If your WHM runs out of MP because derps dying and needs your ballad, you play it. This is what you should care about during learning, after your initial Foe Requium during the pull. Because if your healers doesn't have MP they can't sustain the team which means you guys die early and can't see later phases etc.

Even when the raid gets more comfortable, you have to also note the overall comfortability of the group. Say in a situation where you are pushing to some 30% left and you have full MP. But your WHM is hanging around 1.5k MP, without a Shroud of Saints any soon. Your question will be, am I going to burn a full bar of MP on Foe alone, or save some? If you know your group is a still unstable and there is always one or two dudes who are persistent derps/derpinas then it might be wise to Foe until some 600-700MP left and stop it, in case crap happens and you need to Ballad your WHM through. Now say change the situation to everything the same, but boss is at 15% HP left. You might want to give a gamble and burn all your MP on Foe and hope that no one derps and you get your clear.

All these judgment calls comes with experience and your understanding of the dynamics of your group. Once you have that experience, doesn't take more than a few wipes to know how good or derp your pug group will be and what measures you want to take.

Typically you don't play Ballad/Paeon during adds phase. Adds phase are mostly DPS check phases so you try to pre-emp and top people up before the adds phase, and/or shortly after the adds phase. You should try to have a full bar of MP for Foe Requiem during adds phase. Most adds phase are long enough to let you burn out a full bar of MP on Foe, and regens quite a little bit when the adds phase is over - this is where you can use this fair bit of rengen'd MP to Ballad/Paeon right after the adds phase till dry and let it recover to full/as much as possible before deciding to Foe or Ballad/Paeon. Again, these all comes with experiences. You will get it some day.

[ruskie]

The fact is if people die their DPS output drops as well. So getting them not to die is a must.

[Viviza]

Suggesting that people should stop dying is useless advice. No one wants to make mistakes. Even good players will foul up occasionally, or struggle with unfamiliar content, or content they're not geared for. Be constructive with helping others with their weaknesses, but don't dwell on the "everyone should play perfect" mentality. The ability to recover is important, so be prepared for when it happens, and responsible for it, rather than criticize others after the fact.

Healer MP should generally always be your highest priority. Dead DPS is the worst loss to overall group damage, so allowing healers to raise them is the most help you can offer to the group. If the healers stretch themselves to raise anyway and then can't heal the group, everyone dies, so again it's in your best interest to help them out.

[KaerisKlyne]

I sing before and after DPS checks, but never during unless it's Foe's for casters - too many end-game fights with fairly tight DPS checks to risk singing unless everyone is overgeared for the content and can pull off the check while songs are up

[lxChrisxl]

^ that. especially in ramuh. if the healers need mp to res people for the adds phase it's a wipe anyways. the only time you ever sing the mp/tp songs is when you know you're geared enough to make up for that -20%. any other time you don't sing during dps checks.

[LunarEmerald]

Unless the healer is dangerously close to running out of MP <20%, then I feel the dps check is more important.