Top 5 DPS?

[Hrann]

Well, if a bard is not using his dots or meleeing, then he is not adding more dps than a dps class with his overhaste and spell damage increase.  Consider a normal group of warrior, cleric, beastlord, rogue, mage, bard.  The warrior and rogue are getting 30% increases in damage.  The beastlord and mage are not getting increased that much - perhaps 10% increases (because much of their damage comes from their pet).

But, I don't know how powerful their dots are, so maybe they could fit the bill as a dps class if those are good.

Most of the people I play with consider the bst a "good" dps class, but not a "great" one.

[Morganti]

if yo have pet affinity, then a bard is still increasing your damage by leaps and bounds

Pet Affinity is well worth the 20aa if you group with a bard on a regular basis...

just for call of the muse

[Tiggre]

I'd most definitely say for most groups and most raid situations:

rogue
wizard
necro
monk
magician

I don't think mob positioning for rogues is an issue these days.  Rogues are very much king of melee dps Consistantly the rogues are the best dps, and frankly I don't understand why they are or should be.  They used to be broken before kunark but since have been so enhanced and upgraded it is shameful, imho.  They have much more utility and survivability then I think was intended and their ability to reduce their agro is exceptional.  They were given high dps at one point because sony knew they drew alot of agro doing that.  But now with warriors able to taunt significantly better it removes that risk from the rogues so they can almost go at it ad infinitum.

Having a 65 ranger with am3/eq (which was my main for over 3 years) I don't think a ranger ranks up there even with archery.  For situational damage the ranger using TS used to beat the rogue, but that was only for 2 minutes out of every hour and 12 minutes.  

Bard DPS is pretty pathetic even with all the AA they can get to improve it.  Good weapons can bring them up to parr with some of the lesser equipped classes.  Their HP doesn't seem to be that good nor does their AC (or should I say, make that much of a difference even if it is pretty high for a plate class that is).  Bards bring alot with their overall abilities but are limited in how many they can provide at any one time.  Some can twist 4 songs (maybe even a few exceptional players out there can sing 5) but there's alot of stops and starts to make that happen and the overall benefit isn't that great between 3 and 5 songs.  Their dots are pathetic unless you have the right instrument which at times means you loose your melee ability when equipping an instrument.  Almost all instruments go in the secondary slot and prohit equipping a main hand weapon.  Not every bard has their epic and few weapons have instrument flags on them.

And I agree with Xuthaz.

I'm 4AA away from Pet Affinity. I am curious as to how much it affects my pet.  It is pretty exceptional for me to save that many AA up.   Being that most of the buffing is done before the pet is summoned (especially in expeditions and adventures), I don't know if it will make that much of a difference.   If they wanted to increase our abilities they should do it through our pet and our pet should take most of our defensive and offensive abilities, and then some.  We are the lord of the beast and that differentiates us from just the best summoner or the ability to raise from the dead.

BTW, mages will never admit their true damage potential, frankly any class petitioning for increases such as the mages are, will rarely admit they are powerful.

[Mindlet]

Please don't get me started Tiggre. What you posted about rogues is as far as I am concerned totally wrong. My main is a rogue though so I will state that I am biased here. You say rogues should not do the highest dps. Why is that? Rogues bring exactly 1 thing to a group and thats dps. If they don't do the best dps why would anyone invite them. You say that rogues have utility. Must be blind cause I can't see it. Unless you figure dragging latecomers to a raid is utility. SoS is nice for the rogue but doesn't help a group at all. Escape is even less useful for a group. Please list me all the utility that you think a rogue brings to a group.

[bugman]

bugman wrote:
dps for all classes is SO situational its rediculous that people post general questions like this.  


Is it really? I ask this because the other day a monk was asking for dps classes to join a Vxed Expo. So I offer my services and get a reply back, "when I say DPS I mean Wizard, Mage, Rogue, Ranger or Monk." And I think to myself WTF BST are not DPS?

well there you go, thats a specific situation. in a group (especially one you arent having to slow, or offtank or buff people) bst are often very good dps. not as high as a mob where you're able to unload all your mana, but still good, especially if fights are fast ones as you can usualy maintain getting one or two nooks in, with your melee damage, and pets damage which will equal out to a decent number. will of course depend greatly on your weapons (and mana regen available) vs others that may be joining, but its like that with any class. which again is why its hard to say which class is the best dps. i know bst that arent nearly as well geared that if we're both in the same group its night and day the dps different, so again its such a hard thing to pin down to any one rule.


the ubber secret about bst dps we've all been hiding:

in general bsts are good dps compared to other similarly equiped classes.

[feralize]

Elemental + wizards out dps anyone.. and can sustain dps for quite a long time once they get Ft15+ certain AAs etc.

I disagree with this based on experience.  I don't care what gear, mana regen, AA, FT a wizard has.  There is no way to sustain chain nuking.  At some point, oom will set in.  Then you can only nuke as fast as your mana regen allows.  The burst DPS is higher than everyone else for the first few minutes.  That is true. But as oom kicks in, DPS will dip down to the 80s-100s.

So at some point, it crosses over back to melee (to, say, a rogue) who will out outperform a wizard.

Again, goes back to it being situational.

That's why he said "quite a long time".

Oh, and another thing. Wizards don't need to chain-nuke to be above 200dps which they'd probably need to get to to be one of the top 5 dps classes. 200ps = one 3k nuke (and that's not even including crits) every 15 seconds. That's hardly chain-nuking. If you count crits it's probably more like 1 nuke every 20 seconds. And you'd be able to keep going a very long time just casting 3 nukes per minute.

[Tiggre]

My posts about the rogue class is correct as I stated it!  Rogues were busted, they bitched, and they were fixed.  They were given superior DPS with the caveat that if they didn't watch it they would draw tremendous agro.  Sony knew this and designed it that way.  Rogues took huge agro so Sony put in the ability to evade agro.  At one point the rogue was moved to the bottom of the hate list on a successful evade.  

The problem was evade gave rogues a way out that was far to easy.  So they changed it.  They moved the rogue's position on the hate list down but not totally to the bottom.  This allowed them to balance rogue dps against their hate and still give them a chance to survive.  But the bottom line is that they were clearly told by Sony that their dps came at a cost.

Now you accelerate forward to where we are today.  Their hate is easily managed with the warrior having such improved taunt abilities.  The SK and Pal can hold taunt well also, providing the rogue with more ability to produce damage then they should have (at least according to why they were given their DPS abilities to begin with).  This directly conflicts with why they gave rogues such high dps to begin with and IMHO it makes them overpowered.

Couple this with their Escape skill and you have a very survivable class.  It isn't even funny how important SoS is on raids, in CR, in scouting, etc.

So, I stand by my comments.  Rogues are the tops of the list as dps, have been for a long time and they easily outdamage any melee class including the ranger (except for 2 minutes out of every 72--if the ranger uses their TS discipline every time it pops).

With guilds knowing how to maximize rogue dps and with their ability to position mobs better and the fact that a backstab doesn't need to be done exactly from the back, rogues can sustain their DPS well beyond any other class, so again, I stand by my words!

[Mindlet]

What are you saying? Classes with spells ranger pally sk beast should do the same dps melee as a rogue?

[Choppin]

hmm assuming best gear:

1)rog
2)wiz
3)mag
4)nec
5)mnk

it depends on mobs, if necro can dot totally freely they will be higher dps than mag I think

6)ber (when they have the right gear)
7)rng
8)bst
9)dru
10)sk
11)war
12)pal
13)shm (can rank higher depends on dot useablity)
14)brd
15)enc (assuming no charm)
16)clr (if they wouldnt have to heal and could nuke instead would be higher)

probably some mistakes in there, but this is just what I think could be right on first thought

[Lascaris]

I parse a lot and at tier 3 (so not comparing highest end but kind of mid-level) I out dps the ranger in our group and the wizard that I 2 box.  Wizard dps is all about mana regen.  If you're in a dungeon, so no horse and don't have a bard/sk/necro to help on mana regen, then 200dps would be hard to maintain and frankly I've never been able to do it on a wiz or anything even close to it.  If you're outside, grouped with bard and have VOQ with a necro/sk to  mana recourse you then yea you're probably hitting that high.   My beast does 150ish (pet + spells + melee) although I haven't parsed since the latest round of gear upgrades so might be slightly higher.  Wizards gear is way ghetto, but it's pretty easy to calculate what adding another FT10 would do and I would think he'd end up about = to beast in equivalent level gear in a sustained exp camp.

On raids wizards/rogues > all though[/b]

[Xuthaz]

Tiggre seems to have a bit of class envy.

I played a rogue from release until the beginning of Luclin and I can tell you for a fact that rogues have always been the very best Melee DPS class in the game.  There wasn't any magical changes added that gave us a DPS increase.  We were broken in the fact that we had no way of shedding aggro and no way of surviving the aggro we gained.  most of us smartened up and geared up high AC gear.  my rogue tanked duo with another rogue from lvl 10 on.  Before Kunark was released they fixed Hide/Sneak so they would work in unison, and they gave us the Evade Skill.  It worked as you mentioned for 8 hours before servers were brought down and it was patched to be the buggy hate=#3 aggro list thing.  Even after these changes, I still tanked as a rogue, and my typical group was 5 rogues and a shaman chewing through sebilis.  Rangers never, ever, ever approached the DPS levels of rogues until PoP and the tradable Elemental bows.  If anything should be nerfed, that should be it.  The only time rangers get mentioned as DPS is for guilds that don't have access to elemental lvl weapons other than ranger bows bought in the Bazaar.  What if Ifir's and Zha's were tradable? that would bring DPS more in perspective for pre-elemental people who run about talking about the leet bow DPS.

hmm assuming best gear:

1)rog
2)wiz
3)mag
4)nec
5)mnk

it depends on mobs, if necro can dot totally freely they will be higher dps than mag I think

i'd say move #1 and #2 necro up to atleast the #3 spot, with any of necros sitting around #16 spot since mobs only have 30 buff/debuff slots.

6)ber (when they have the right gear)
7)rng
8)bst
9)dru
10)sk
11)war
12)pal
13)shm (can rank higher depends on dot useablity)
14)brd
15)enc (assuming no charm)
16)clr (if they wouldnt have to heal and could nuke instead would be higher)

I'd move DPS druids up the list a bit, no clue on berserkers so won't comment on them.  I'd move bst down a spot definitely below DPS druids (druids on heal chain aren't dps :P) SK's i'd move up a spot with BST above war but below SK.  you did say best equipment.

[Tastian]

"There wasn't any magical changes added that gave us a DPS increase."

Really?  Because I remember min backstab damage going in.  Increased min backstab damage with level.  Various other changes.  Rogues are great dps and have been, but escape and shroud of stealth definetly improved surviability and utility.  No class envy just fact.  Necros are pretty high on dps long as mob lives anytime at all and if not they still have crazy enough mana regen to support more inefficent nukes for awhile + pet.  Wizard in short term, but longer term you lean more toward rogues.  Ele bows definetly are what skews most peoples dps of rangers.

[Vorph]

Since the melee revamp, not even trueshot can beat a well-equipped rogue*.  Wizards don't beat them over the short term either, let alone in a prolonged fight.  Wizards still have much higher survivability though...mobs are much more forgiving of a series of long-range nukes than they are of a massive barrage of constant dps, even when your MT has ever aggro generation toy possible.

(* - JTB + DoD/Quarm or GoD equivalents)


As for BST, we do just fine.  I (+pet) sustained over 200 dps on the Diabolic Destroyer in Ikkinz the other night, and my weapons aren't even that great.  Granted, a good rogue could do twice that in a 2.5 min fight, but raw dps isn't everything.  And anyone who wouldn't take a BST on a Tipt run as dps is pretty ignorant of the game, and odds are you were probably lucky to not end up in that group.

[TerjynPovar]

It's not really the blasting at range that gives Wizards their new survivability, it's those spiffy Concussion pants (best wizard item ever).

[Xuthaz]

your post indicates that rogues were broken (they were) and they were fixed by adding DPS.  this isn't true, they have always been highest melee dps before these changes were made.  They did add min backstab dmg and later in kunark they also added double backstab at 55 as a class feature, but rogues were still best DPS before these changes.