I've compiled this list of Beastlord offensive AAs in order to give some more detail then the main AA table. Many AA skills have been parsed out/calculated in the past and i thought it'd be handy to archive them before the results of those parses are forgotten. The list is not complete; i did not include Finishing Blow, Coup de Grace, Double riposte and Flash of Steel as their benefit is negligible except in certain uncommon/extreem situations. I will use the following format: Name, levels+cost per level, melee restriction (e.g. only works when tanking/dualwielding), description, efficiency (the dps gain per pt).
I'll be the last person to tell what AAs you should pursue, that's your own decision. But if you're looking to up your dps a little bit and don't know which skill to choose, maybe this post can help a little in your choice
1) Bestial Frenzy
- 5 levels, 2 pts/level
- Melee restrictions: none, always works (passive)
- BF gives a 3% chance to perform a double-attack per level. It works on both mainhand and offhand weapons, and gives the same benefit to all weapon types. When a succesful doubleattack check is made, normal rules for hit/miss/riposte etc still apply. The increase in melee dps you get from BF is the same as the double-attack chance, i.e. 3%/level
- Efficiency: 1.5%/pt (melee dps)
2) Ambidexterity
- 1 level, 9 pts
- Melee restrictions: works only when dualwielding (passive)
- Ambidexterity adds approx 9% to the dualwield rate (at lvl 65 Ambi raises the dw rate from 82.5% to 91.5%). The increase in melee dps you get will depend on the quality of your OH weapon compared to the MH weapon, but generally it will be 4-5%
- Efficiency: ~ 0.5%/pt (melee dps)
3) Combat Fury
- 3 levels, 2/4/6 pts
- Melee restrictions: none, always works (passive)
- CF gives you a chance to score critical damage on a normal hit. In addition to the chance you get from CF itself, your dexterity also plays an important role. CF1 at 100 DEX gives a 1% chance to score a crit. Each additional level of CF adds 0.5% to the chance to crit. For every 50 pts of DEX above 100, another 0.33% is added. So for instance CF1 at 250 DEX gives 1 + 3*0.33 = 2% crit chance, the same as having CF3 at only 100 DEX (1+2*0.5). The average critical damage is about 1.75X the average normal damage for a MH weapon and 2X average normal damage for an OH weapon.
- Efficiency: CF1 (at 250 DEX) ~ 0.8%/pt, CF2 ~ 0.1%/pt, CF3 - negligible (melee dps)
4) Fury of the Ages
- 3 levels, 2 pts/level
- Melee restrictions: none, always works (passive)
- FotA gives additional improvements to the chance to score a crit hit. I haven't actually seen this skill parsed out, but from what i've been told it is very likely that FotA adds another 0.5%/level to the crit chance
- Efficiency: ~ 0.13%/pt (melee dps)
5) Frenzy of Spirit
- 1 level, 4 pts
- Melee restrictions: none, always works (activated)
- FoS gives you 99% haste and +336 to ATK (including melee ATK bonus) for 8 ticks (48s). Re-use time is 12 minutes. The duration can be extended with Spell Casting Reinforcement. The total melee dps increase you get from FoS can vary a lot depending on what haste you normally have and the level your ATK rating is usually at. If you find you're usually at max haste anyway then the haste from FoS will do nothing for you. The higher your ATK is normally at, the less dps increase you get from the additional 336 ATK (diminishing returns at high ATK). The increase in melee dps can therefore vary between 0.5% and ~2%. Fun when used together with the Bestial Fury discipline!
- Efficiency: 0.1-0.5%/pt (melee dps)
6) Spell Casting Fury
- 3 levels, 2/4/6 pts
- Restrictions: applies to direct damage only (nukes and weapon procs) (passive)
- First level gives a 2% chance to score critical hit for 33% more damage, second levels gives 4% chance at 66% more damage and 3rd level gives a 7% chance for 100% more damage. The increase in direct damage dps is 0.67%, 3.3% and 7% respectively
edit: that should be 0.67, 2.67 and 7 % resp. Efficiencies are ok
- Efficiency: SCF1 - 0.33%/pt, SCF2 - 0.67%/pt, 0.78%/pt. (direct damage dps)
To properly scale this with the melee enhancing skills 1-5, you need to know the ratio of your direct damage dps to melee dps. If, for instance, your melee dps is three times as high as your direct damage dps, then you'll have to divide the efficiency numbers by 3.
7) Mental Clarity
- 3 levels, 2/4/6 pts
- Restrictions: only when the extra mana is used for nukes/DoTs (passive)
- When the extra mana gained from MC is used for instance to cast more Scorpion Venoms (1132 damage for 360mana) then the dps gain can be estimated as follows: with an additional mana regen of 1pt/tick you get one additional cast of SV every 360 ticks (2160s), hence the dps increase is 1132/2160 ~ 0.5 dps
- Efficiency: to properly scale the efficiency of MC with the melee enhancing skills, you need to know your exact melee dps. If your melee dps is 50 dps, then the efficiency is 0.5dps/50dps/2pts = 0.5%/pt for MC1, MC2 - 0.25%/pt, MC3 - 0.17%/pt
8) Planar Power
- 5 levels, 2pts/level
- Restrictions: none (passive)
- The 25 STR you get from PP5 will raise your ATK by 23 pts. This in turn will raise your dps by ~ 1%
- Efficiency: 0.1%/pt (melee dps)
Comments/questions/criticisms?
/hugs
Planar Power will also raise yer dex, giving a boost to proc dps (I assume? - not 100% sure how much stats help past 255). Since I'm using Ethereal Destroyer in my main hand aug'd with 150 poison DD proc, the added dex most likely gives me (and other beastlords using the BOOMstick) higher dps boost than the added str.
Other than that an excellent post as usual Coprolith. /bow
Who knew a Troll could write so well? :) Thanks as always.
Good point Argach. DEX will also help a (tiny) bit. The point you make about stats above 255 is something i also hadn't considered. I know you get 0.9 pts of ATK per pt of STR in the entire range from 115 to 280. Above that i cant be sure. STA for instance gives less hp's per point above 280 according the paladin board.
Perhaps someone with PP5 and 305 STR can do a quick check by removing some STR gear?
/hugs
Surely this is sticky worthy. Right??
Glad to see you and arg here on the new boards cop. 8) I just had a couple things to throw in (as usual 8P ).
Do your calcuations on Frenzy of spirit assume 100% up time? I vaguely remember your post on it back on the old boards, but it's early, so I'm not quite sure. If you actually had some downtime then instead of frenzy being on for ~1 minute(scr3) of every 12. It would actually be active for say 1 minute out of every 8 minutes of fight time or something to that effect. Making have a bigger impact imo.
Also for double riposte. It's very situational because you have to be tanking and I know not all bst tank, but I do quite a bit. My riposte dps (with 17dmg +1poi) weapon main hand is ~2-3dps. That will vary a lot based on time spent tanking, slows, stuns, multiple mobs, etc. However, if you want I can throw you some of my #'s on actual riposte % based on incoming swings if you wanted to get a rough idea of how many extra swings double riposte would give or what not. It's a very expensive skill and even if you tank 100% of the time it's still not going to be very high up the list from an effiency standpoint I don't think.
Hiya Tastian :)
yer correct, the FoS calculations are based on my previous parses where i had 100 % uptime. With good timing between FoS re-use and fight time you can indeed get more out of it, up to 50% more perhaps. In practise, that extra benefit is diminished again because you wont be casting it exactly every 12 minutes (so far i always try to time it so i can use it together with the bestial fury disc)
As for DR, its not the percentage of incoming swings that determines your dps gain, its the percentage of your own swings that are ripostes.
When im soloing using my DW combo, the number of swings that are ripostes is only ~0.6%. With DR3 that number would go up to 0.9%. So the dps gain is only 0.3% for 18 points. When im using a SoFW, the number of ripostes goes up to ~1.5%, giving a dps gain of 0.75% for 18 pts. I suppose in the extreme case when you're using a Dathor Greathammer and are fighting unslowed mobs the dps gain could go up to ~5%. But who fights unslowed mobs?
I set my personal limit at 0.1%/pt. Anything below that i consider negligible. Best case scenario for DR is DR1 using a 2HB, ~0.075%/pt
/hugs
Str drop from 285 to 280 reduced my atk by 4, so it seems at least str works same way past 255 as it does pre-255 - sta on the other hand seems to give half of the hp past 255 than what it does pre-255.
I don't understand why CF3 rates negligable?
I set a limit at 0.1% gain per aa point. Anything less, like CF3, i deem negligible
/hugs
Because CF really falls off as you train the ranks in it from an AA point efficency. Rank 1 gives ~2% as I recall. Rank 2 gives about 0.5% ditto for rank 3. Rank 1 is 2 points, rank 2 is 4 more points and rank 3 is 6 more points (12 for all 3). Look at the efficency of CF2 and realizing that for a minor gain in crit % you have to spend just as many points as you did for CF1 & CF2 it's easy to see how CF3 is rather negligable. This is one of the main reasons you see a lot of bsts (and other classes) with CF1. Paladins need CF3 as a pre-req for slay undead, and for archery CF seems to have a much better return so rangers max. Lots of others things to buy though that will yield a bigger return than CF3. *shrugs* time to eat hehe.
stickkyyy as usual
This is a really helpful thread....
Double Reposte, Flash of Steel?
Finishing blow, Coupe de Grace?
Yeah, I just wanted to chime in to let Cop know his efforts are appreciated. I will probably move SCF up a little in my list due to this post.
Is there a similar discussion about defensive AAs anywhere? Like has anyone parsed CA vs CS and we 'know' that CA is lots better? How much does 3 lvls of CA do for us. How much does 3 levels of CS do for us. Things like that?
Testing defensive skills is tons more annoying and much harder imo. I've done a lot of parsing in regards to LR/CS/ID, but the damage reduction will vary a lot from mob to mob. On the old boards I posted what my avoidance #'s were (dodge/block/miss/riposte). However, I didn't have solid baseline #'s for those. If any 65 bst without CA/LR that wanted to get wacked for a couple hours and put up some results I'd do the same.
amen tastian
While parsing out defensive skills is easy in theory, in practice it's a lot harder to do then parsing out offensive skills. There's a number of mobs in-game that don't fight back. When testing a offensive skill you can just stand behind them, hit auto-attack, turn off the monitor and go to bed. In the morning you'll have a nice large samplesize. And you've got very good control over the conditions (haste, str etc). If you're testing an activated ability or the effect of some spell that requires more user interaction, but you can still do those parses with only half an eye on the monitor. I usually combine them with some household work. And sometimes, when you have a good baseline parse, you can straight out calculate what an ability or spell will do, no parsing necessary.
Not so with defensive skills parsing, they require constant user attention. Parsing during normal xp sessions doesn't work very well, because the conditions may change midfight (buffs fading for instance), xp mobs usually vary in level, etc. All that adds to the statistical variance of the parse and as a result you need a huge samplesize. I tried to do this myself, but the results were so depressing i just gave it up.
The best way to do it is to pick a single mob and let it hammer on you, but without fighting back yourself cuz you dont want to kill the mob. So you'll need constant healing (and making sure you never drop below 20% health) and still stay on top of the mob's agro list. And while there are blue con mobs that, once slowed, can barely scratch my natural regen, slowing the mob is counterproductive because it also slows the sampling rate. You have to realize that to parse out the relatively small effects of the defensive skills you need samplesizes of the order of 10000 swings. Even for unslowed mobs, that's several hours of per parse. You can do with less, but that can make the variance in your results so large that you often can't draw hard conclusions from them. So its hours and hours of parsing in which you have to pay constant attention to your hp bar and don't get anything in return but your parse results. As Tastian said, it's annoying not to mention boring. You have to sacrifice a lot of time that could be spent otherwise which is why good defensive parses are sparse.
And you have to get it right from the start, there's no going back once you've acquired a defensive skill as happened to me. Once you've got the baseline, you'll have to do the parses of the defensive skills under the same conditions. But it could take months to get all the necesssary AA points, during which a lot can change, your own gear, changes to the game engine, even revamps of zones so that the mob you started on is no longer there (this happened to my paladin's fav parse mob).
In short, it takes a lot of hard work and deducation to parse out defensive skills, and people that are willing to do so are to be highly commended. Even if their samplesizes are limited because of time and don't provide hard numbers, it still adds to the overall qualitative picture of the defensive skills.
To make matters worse, no one really knows for sure how SoE exactly defines avoidance and mitigation. They sure aren't using the definition the rest of the world uses. And because of that, we can't simply calculate what the listed effects will do from a parsed baseline either. When it says that CA3 will increase your avoidance by 10% that doesn't mean you'll take 10% less damage. As far as people have been able to determine from CA parses the mob will miss 10% more often, but total avoidance also includes ripostes, blocks and dodges. So the effective damage reduction is less then 10%. (note: and keep in mind the parsed numbers have considerably uncertainty to them).
With CS its even less clear what SOE means with a 10% mitigation bonus.
So the best we can do is make educated guesses based on numbers with relatively large uncertainty. And while i have made such educated guesses in the past (i like to think im good at educated guesses, i do alot of that professionally), i'm not going to post them here because i don't want to risk them being considered as hard numbers
Hmmm, got a bit long-winded again did I? :D
/hugs
Yeah cop the parses I did on ID were some of the most boring bleh times I've ever spent in EQ. It took me hours to get the samples I did and they still were only about half the size I'd have really liked. What we need is a 65 bst with ~1k AC to get pounded on by sun revs or something for a few hours and give us a really solid baseline. My parses of CA never showed much parse by parse, but there's definetly a difference. If we could get a decent size sample of 65 bst no CA/ no CS then we could run them againist 65 bst LR5 ID5. I was actually going to go back and try to get more samples againist sun revs and possibly figure in PE, but the effects are so small from what I've tested so far it'd take me about 5(ish) hours of getting beat on to get the effects of ID to be less than the error margin lol. This is definetly something I would like to do though. Since I have my 30 AA banked for GoD I might put in a few hours this weekend and see what I can come up with. *shrugs* It's never going to be nearly as nice as how offensive skills break down. For avoidance you can look at mobs dps and factor in increase in miss%, and for mitigation maybe look at reduction in damage based on mobs DI but *shrugs* more data can't hurt (unless it's flawed lol), but I'll see what I can do.
What i've been thinking about is to have to my druid bot beat on me for a while. Of course the mechanics of PC damage and NPC damage are not quite the same, but im hoping my natural regen is sufficient to counter the damage done by the druid ad infinitum. If that's the case, i can at least do some overnight parses and get really big sample sizes. Just gotta figure out what part of the results are portable to NPC damage.
/hugs
I can off-set mist panthers regen, but his damage is so small it's hard to see much of anything. At that point you simply see the shift in hit distribution. That's mainly what mitigation is and at this point I think the best my results can be will be increase of min hit by ~x% and decrease in max hit by ~y%. Was hoping to be able to draw a better conclussion based on DI of mob though. *shrugs* I'll throw up what I have this weekend and if nothing else it's some data that maybe others can build on or use. I wish I had done more parses before I got CS/ID. 8(
Had 9 aa's saved and banked for GoD then twitched and bought Ambi. Oh well:)
My most appreciative thanks to all you number crunchers. You've saved me a lot of heartache.