[Dalven]

Originally Posted by astuce999 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

On a raid with lag it's better to sing 3 if on resist duty (2 rythms with drums + another).

On a raid when not on resist duty, you can still manage 4 songs no problem.

Only when in groups or soloing should the 5 song twist become relevant, I've posted about it on p99 multiple times. It has to do with what Dalven was talking about.

About your math, songs aren't 12 second duration. Songs are 12.1 to 17.9 second duration, depending on the server tick. This important difference gives plenty of room for a stable 4 song twist.

Astuce

As you say there's no point messing about with 4 songs on raids - as t0lkien points out a 3 song twist is the only way to guarantee no drops. I've never really had a good grip of the math of it but from personal experience I've always found four or five songs works for me in groups.

My point about a song dropping though - some songs are useless unless they are up all the time. If a mob aoe lands on the tick the resist song was down because I was trying to get a bit more AC/Haste/Regen onto my group, there was no point in having it up at all. It's risky and inelegant to twist songs that are dropping continually IMO. The effect you point out about server ticks just makes it all the more inexact. We never really know when this is until it ticks - despite the tools that help us guess. Mix in lag with this - both yours and others' - (I'm on a constant 250ms which is not bad compared to the 500ms+ I had on live) and it's a total crap shoot.

Like I say I've never really been into the math but Astuce makes a good post here and there's some further discussion in that thread on different ways bards on the server twist 4 songs. For me the momentary drop in effect is worth getting a whole extra song in. Its a fair point someone might get nuked if it hits in the time the effect is down but these things can happen and in my experience chances of it are fairly low. Hopefully you or someone else will be doing interrupts anyway.

Re. aggro dumping, with high damaging mobs I've found it counter-productive to be the puller if I have a tank who can't grab aggro. Body pulling can be terribly inexact (I've run over mobs and stood on top of them and still not gained aggro on p99, while the mob 5m away immediately aggros - something is definitely different to live), so it's usually necessary to land a Bellows or something. I've also been hammered into paste multiple times because my group couldn't regain aggro no matter what they did after I've done that. In the end it was more efficient for the tank to pull. The caveat is that this usually hasn't happened with SKs and Paladins.

Not to dispute your comments on pulling, because as I said, I've never majored on it and only once or twice done it in raids, and always outdoors. I would however say that FD is *the* premium tool for splitting mobs. The proof of that was that in Velious, every single raid I went on had a monk puller. Past Luclin I never once saw a Bard pull for a raid either (though my raiding diminished a lot before I quit). Actually the proof for that was Thott's constant whining

I should emphasise that when I'm talking about playing a bard I'm talking about it from a grouping perspective. I don't have much experience Velious or onwards but bard pulling effectiveness post Velious isn't relevant here, although they got Fading Memories to level the playing field in PoP didn't they?

I've played with and seen some great monks in action pulling on raids and in dungeons but I'll maintain for places with a ton of casters and tight clusters the monk will want the bard out there pulling. Ultimately I think bards have a better range of pulling tools and can be more flexible in a group situation when it comes to pulls. Dumping agro is only one method of pulling effectively - bards can split mobs just as effectively in a group scenario.

I've found that pulling with projectiles generates a minimum amount of agro and have never had issues with tanks pulling it off me. Using charm to bring in mobs is another option - once you break the charm the mobs agro list is reset and a tank can pick up the mob with ease. There are numerous ways to overcome this problem and in most cases it won't be one as long as you're not pulling with snare.

Thott as a high level bard and in charge of an uber EQ guild was probably more concerned with bard pulling at a raid level, where the focus was definitely put on FD pulling, because he was likely sick of having to sing resist songs at all the raids.

I'm sorry, but years of playing on live show this not to be true for me. I can never keep four songs up reliably and have never seen another Bard do it either. This is easy to show if you stand somewhere and just twist four songs that have icons. One will inevitably start dropping (they'll rotate naturally). If it's different on p99... well it's different. On live that's how it was. I'll test this on p99 now for confirmation. Hang tight.Yep confirmed as the same on p99 for me. A four song twist has icons dropping. You guys are either theory crafting and not observing it ingame, or my ping is making the difference (though I can't see how that's true as it's consistent), or there is some other factor at work that I'm not aware of. I don't know what to else to say...

Here's a challenge though - keep up a four song twist reliably over a minute or two and post the fraps video.

No one is saying that you can sing four songs without the icons and effects dropping. I'm arguing that the effects dropping for a marginal period of time doesn't matter. As I've said the chances of a momentarily lost effect causing a wipe are pretty slim - this obviously isn't the case for mez/snare but this is easily mitigated by paying attention.

Seriously, I don't believe you guys. Thott didn't either by the way (http://www.afterlifeguild.org/Thott/powercurves.php):

Quote:
The reason that bards can do decent damage around level 50 even with the flat curve is that the songs themselves limit a bard prior to level 46. Before 46 a bard doesn't have 3 decent damage songs to sing, so damage is limited to just 2/3 of what it could be based on the curve. So the curve increases in max possible damage output with a more normal shape due to when the songs become available. Yet a bard is surely singing three songs, a decent bard is at least, prior to 46, so switching from 2 to 3 damage songs isn't an increase in damage, it's trading something else the bard was singing for damage. It increases the speed, not the efficiency, of damage the bard can do. And thus the graphed curve is accurate, and it's flat.

I.E. Three songs is the standard full twist. And as I said, that is proveable just by standing there and twisting 4 icon songs. Show me the video of a solid four song twist over a few minutes, or honestly, it's all theorycrafting.

That quote is taken out of context of that article to be fair. In it he's talking about the power of bards relative to increasing level was crap compared to other classes and complaining about it. He mentions the 3 song twist as being standard while giving an example relating to this, which is probably just arbitrary. I don't see any discussion about the relative benefits of twisting 3 songs vs 4 songs.

People were having this same discussion back in 2001.

This guy thought the idea of twisting 4 songs was dumb but acknowledged that people did it. This other guy kinda liked the idea and goes into it in a bit of depth.