Bard Group: When to hangup the sword and pick up the lute?

[Aaramis]

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

Equipping an instrument applies the instrument modifier to the dot damage. if your isntrument has strength 21 (mistmoore battle drums, easy to get) than your damage increases by a factor of 2.1. So the 130 will be a bit more than 60 without instruments. Hard to do more than 60 damage a tick reliably with weapons as a 46 bard. Still, it's a possibility. You will have to be close to the mob though which is another inconvenience if you want to fear kite for example.

If you really *like* to swing your weapons you won't gimp yourself by doing so and applying dots at the same time, but the effort is really not needed.

Yeah, MM drums are one of the higher ratios - I was using an example of about a 1.6 modifier which is probably the base stuff, which is why I said it depends on your gear. If you have awesome instruments, then yeah, you're probably better off just using instruments. If you're an A/A twink with a Siren Song dagger, then melee is probably your better option.

All told, though, the damage is probably not going to be a huge difference between melee + base songs vs. no melee + instrument-modified songs. Probably equates to less than a 5 or 10% variable, although that's a number I'm just guessing at.

Obviously, for swarm kiting melee is out. And dragons / raid targets, I'd probably avoid melee too unless you have Siren Song / Epic and want to proc.