BRD, when to prioritize aoe skills over multi dot? viceversa? both?

[SoleilAlphi]

Greetings I am a relatively new player, started a little more than a month ago, and I am getting close to level cap. I love bard and want to get better at it, but there is a dilemma I can't solve still. I know that it is important to keep up Venomous and Windbite, because there is the chance they reset the cd of Rain of Death-Bloodletter, and the more dots I apply on many targets the more chance the CD resets. But I noticed that for large pulls where I need to do a lot of aoe and burn mobs fast, that slows me down, however if I don't apply dots (or only on one target) and only use aoe skills, I lose on the RoD extra dps because cooldown. So how do I prioritize things?

[cetrei]

I would say 2 targets multi-dot, more than 2 use AoE weaponskills.

[bardaboo]

What i like to do is turn off minuet while the tank is pulling, straight shot and dot away, i even use rain of death and quick nock while running to the next set. Any good tank will get agro on the mobs before running to the next group. If you pull hate stack next to tank when he stops. Then buff up, flaming arrow,and aoe away. If you notice you're missing out on bloodletter procs during cast of quick nock leave minuet off, no cast time means more procs can be used.

[ShaneDawn]

The previous comment is on the spot, you should single-dot mobs during the pull and unleash hell with aoes as the tank stops. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a lot of free RoD procs to spam between Quick Knocks/Volley.

As for an exact number of mobs to multidot, if you can't dot things prior to the pull: if the mobs don't melt instantly, I would always multidot at least up to 3-4 mobs. By the time you have dotted the third mob, you can either straight shot and refresh dots on the first mob, or move on to the fourth one if the first one is close to dying as is. Or do a few aoes to finish the pack off. Using aoes without any dots refreshing your RoD procs on packs of 3-4 fairly resilient mobs is detrimental and generally a bad idea.

The most effective strategy depends a lot on who and what classes you're playing with: I've had a few SMNs that can make multidotting completely irrelevant on on packs you should usually be doing that on.

[SoleilAlphi]

Understood, thank you for the advices

[0811]

Straight shot then multi dot 3 mobs, then alternate between wide volley and iron jaws starting from your first target to the third one, spam rain of death procs, reapply straight shot as needed. Or alternatively if the mobs are squishy, after applying your dots on 3 targets just spam wide volley and rain of death. If paired with a dps and/or healer with good AoE you might wanna ditch reapplying dots cuz with the Wide Volley and RoD spam + good aoe from the other dps the mobs will go down pretty quick.