Quote:
Originally Posted by Estu
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
I'd like to point out that Reiker, or whatever his name is, posted a nice analysis of JBBs a while ago that basically successfully makes the argument that it's often more efficient to spend mana to do damage and then to cannibalize than to use a JBB. He was essentially saying that the item, while useful, is not quite as much of a godsend as people think, particularly as you get higher level. If anyone could dig up the post and post a link here, that would be cool.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by me
There was a "discussion" about the usefulness of JBB awhile ago on this forums. My stance is fairly anti-JBB. I'm also curious why you need to root the mob, you'll never lose aggro over your pet (which is good, shaman pet is a horrible tank compared to the shaman).
Anyways, regarding JBB. This item is very good when you can first use it (45) but after awhile it actually becomes detrimental to use. I see you mentioned Pox, which would assume you were JBBing in PoP, which I don't recommend.
As I mentioned before, the strength of a shaman is no downtime. Any time you're not casting a spell you're wasting time. Every action a shaman takes can be represented in "time efficiency" instead of "mana efficiency." The JBB does 263 damage after an 8 second cast time, or 32.875 dps. The benefit of the JBB is that it's mana free. If there's any class that doesn't care about the mana cost of something, it's shaman. If you weren't clicking JBB above, you could afford to cast spells such as Blood of Saryrn. Blood of Saryrn takes 3 seconds to cast and costs 535 mana. To regain that mana it'll take about 6 cannis, or 30 seconds. Blood of Saryrn cost you 33 total seconds. That may seem like a lot until you consider that focuses, Flowing Thought, AAs, and mana regen buffs will make this even more efficient (but won't affect JBB). Blood of Saryrn does 2324 total damage, or 70.42 dps when considering the time lost to canni back mana. Again note that the time decreases with focuses, etc, increasing the potential dps by a lot.
Basically, the JBB would be an amazing and potentially overpowering item in the hands of any other class besides a shaman. Many use one early and get attached to it, not understanding that it's actually hindering them.
|
Notes: For whatever reason I confused Pox of Bertoxxulous with Breath of Ultor so I wrote this in the context of PoP, where JBB is fairly bad for the reasons above. Although definitely more useful in Kunark and Velious, I look at it like this:
I generally camp my own JBBs. I love soloing the 4 crypt nameds in seb for the phats. If you can hold that camp, a JBB is most likely not going to help you much. You're better off just DPSing / canning / torporing as normal. Even if the dps is on par with JBB, a JBB interrupt is a lot worse than say a canni interrupt so it's still not as good of an option. One strategy to use with the JBB is to click it immediately after casting a normal spell, since you'll save a couple seconds (item clickies ignore global spell cooldown). Chain clicking defeats this advantage, though. If you're not a top tier shaman or aren't very good at the "shaman gameplay" (which is a lot different than any other caster in some ways) the JBB can seem pretty awesome and is a pretty awesome leveling tool at 45. I'd just much rather farm and sell them for 15k+ a pop.
In Velious they get even less useful, due to better spells (Canni4 is insane) and high cold resists.