EQ2 Forum Archive @ EQ2Wire - Victorious Concerto

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- - Victorious Concerto (https://archive.eq2wire.com//showthread.php?t=470881)

What is the point?!A 10 second proc every five minutes that does very little damage... and yes I can parse with the best of 'em so that's not the issue.This was nerfed in Beta, too much... please de-nerf the only good thing for Dirges this expansion.

Now I am curious. I did a few rounds of testing on a training dummy, with ROVC and I dont see the issue. Could it be fixed maybe? I know it is not in the patch notes but possibly.After 10 rounds on the training dummy it averaged out at a 10% increase to my DPS. Now am I geared to the hilt? No I am not. My guild does ok. We are in the middle of TSO content as we are just realy getting back into the high end raiding content. I have 4 pieces of tier 4. Now that said I am also not parsing 10k on the training dummy either. Could it be that it scales in effectiveness in regards to your dps. For instance if you are doing 5k dps you will see a 10 to 15% increase? On the other hand if you do 13k dps you only see a 2 to 5% increase?I also had no issue with VC going off. Not even failed once. I did notice it will not let you cast VC UNTIL the 10 seconds has expired.My 2 cp worth. Would love to hear from someone more adept at parsing then I <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

I'll get some figures tonight but if you parse higher it should make no difference % wise ad the proc is directly related to the DPS that you do during Rythmic Overture.It has also failed to work for me a few times since live ... improvement from Beta when it was consistently not working, but still.

As an update. I have been playing around with ROVC and decided to put my second point into it. Guess what?As soon as I put the second point in it it started screwing up

This ability was overpowered in beta and now it is underpowered and broken. Please find some middle ground and fix this ability. Thanks.Props to the Dev that came up with the idea for VC..... it just needs to be fixed.

This ability is broken. It works roughly 50% of the time. I've had it fail up to six times in a row. I have two points in it on my Troubador. When it works you can get some decent damage out of it, but the recast is WAY too long for a ten second dps buff. When it comes down to it, this ability is pretty much irrelevant imo.

I've just dropped VC.Completely pointless given:a) it doesn't work 3/4 of the timeb) when it does work the damage it gives sucksc) when you want to use it again you can't because the re-cast is way too long.Yes a great idea, however unbelievably poor reponse by nerfing it so much. Yes it might have been a bit overpowered, but the result post nerf is just a joke.I'll be spending my AA in the bard tree on utility - wooo wooo /sarcasm off.

This actually appears to be working reliably since yesterday's patch, even though nothing was mentioned in the notes. The reuse time issue remains, of course.

It hits for 10-15k in raids for me, and is roughly 6-8% of a parse on trash when used. It's been perfectly fine since they stopped it from proccing for 50-60k.It hasn't been completely broken. The issue has been that the buff that lets you cast Concerto didn't apply while you were casting a spell. If you have capped haste it ends while you're paused for your 5th or 6th auto attack after you use it.EDIT: Also, the reuse time is fine.

while the dps on it does seem kind of lacking. the only problem i really found with it was if you use it before you engage the mob it doesnt work. for instance, case cob,RO, then other spells it wont work. If you do debuff,cob,RO it works all the time.

So it appears that Victorious Concerto is now working properly. Too bad it still sucks. Based on some testing data, and extrapolating to a standard group, it appears that Victorious Concerto will now proc for 2500 - 3000 damage per attack for a 10 second period. Based on several tests, it appears that each of the dps classes in the group will proc it 10 - 12 times during that 10 second period; and the casting time is 4 seconds. It isn't too difficult to develop a pretty good approximation of what Victorious Concerto would do to group-wide dps if it were just a simple click-to-cast spell and weren't being hidden behind a whole bunch of bells and whistles. So, lets see...here's the stats if this were just a simple click to dps spell:Casting time :4 secondsDamage (2500-3000) x (10-12 procs per person) x (4-5 dpsers in group) = damage 100,000 - 180,000So a single click spell that did 100k to 180 k would be awesome...even with a casting time of 4 seconds.However, let's now divide that 100k to 180 k by the 5 minute recast timer(100,000 - 180,000) / (300 seconds)Hence, we arrive at the total real impact of the new bard endline ability; which is a long-term 333 - 600 dps increase group-wide; about the same as adding poison from the Agility AA tree.So we got a 4 second cast time (2 autoattack swings lost) ability that does 333-600 dps group-wide; that's pretty awful.A couple of the most efficient troub abilities (such as Perfect Shrill) effectively do between 250-350 dps with a casting time of 1 second; So, while Victorious Concerto adds 1.55 times as much damage group-wide as Perfect Shrill does, it takes 4 times as long to cast. In fact, the time efficiency of this spell is so poor that I would rate it's long-term effiency as about equivalent to giving us a second Painful Lamentations spell.Even if we discount the long-term efficiency and assume that we're only going to us it once, on a short fight, it's still only doing 100k to 180 k group wide with a 4 second casting timer or 25k to 45k damage per second of casting time (Most tier 1 dps have several abilities that contribute about this much or more; ie assassinate or ; so for a short 10 second time-window (once every 5 minutes), the bard gets to contribute about the same amount of group-wide dps as tier 1 dps.Btw, the ability only does between 25,000 and 36,000 damage when cast while soloing; which, when divided by its casting time amounts 6,250 - 9000 damage per second of casting time (btw, the long casting time precludes auto-attack). Keep in mind that during the 4 seconds casting time, this is the only damage we will be doing, exclusive of damage-over-time tics already on the mob. So, once every 10 minutes we get to substitute 6,260 - 9000 dps for the cumulative dps of all the rest of our abilities.As you can see, the practical effect of the new bard endline is pretty underwhelming. Btw, I wonder if the developers did this kind of analysis before nerfing the ability.

First of all, you misunderstand this ability. It's one thing to look at it for a ZW parse, but that ignores it's real gift: a super fast burn. I've had people ask what the hell killed that named so fast when I've used it. There are a lot of dps checks in only the instances this expansion. It's also good for clearing up a sticky situation. And your 2500-3000 number is really low. I'm in t3/t4 2 set, myth, SF jewelery and when I don't get distracted during RO, I can get it to hit for 5800, 6100 was my top. And I just upgraded a few more items putting me at 101% crit 99% DA 31% potency and 19% Crit bonus, and my offhand went from 105 (Lifespike) to 121 (t2 mark sword), so I'm looking forward to find out what my new typical group damage is. This thing is going to do sick damage. My gear is nothing special, and these numbers are easy to get with instance and mark gear.To get a big VC, you can do it on the name itself if it doesn't have an annoying trick that would interrupt RO. This is ideal because people throw all their debuffs and such on names. Also the fight will last long enough for Scream of Death to be ticking hard. The downside is you usually can't use CoB on RO and VC in this case. But you might be able to, some of those fights are long. Another good time is on a triple^ before a name. It won't be fully debuffed, but most of them last the 15 seconds or so you need for a nice RO. I start with my debuffs, stealth (want to save bump for RO), Scream of Death, Wail of the Banshee, CoB, RO, and then use all the other damage abilites. You can fit nearly all of them in it. Before the RO casting bug was fixed, I would stop 2 short to make sure RO recorded, now I just hit them all. That reminds me of another good reason to charge up before the intended VC target, you get all your abilities back to proc off of.What I don't like about this ability is that RO is on a 2.5 minute timer, and only lasts for 2.5 minutes. In beta it lasted for 4.5 minutes, but they had issues with the two possible ROs before VC stacking so now they make it so the timer couldn't allow it. This just sucks, because the point of having RO on a 2.5 minute timer is that you could redo a bad one. Now it doesn't matter. 2.5 mintues is less painful than 5 minutes for a bad parse, but there have been so many times where just 1 minute longer would mean I could use VC on the target I charged it up for. It's frustrating.I'm pretty happy with the damage it does, it's nothing compared to beta but that's good. There would have been no reason for that to be in the game. It couldn't have been in the game, it was so overpowered. It was 4x as powerful. I'd be getting procs for over 20k. I could hit 10 CAs in that time, multiplied by my group? It would have trivialized anything it was used on. And what about raid dirges? Hot [Removed for Content] that would have been something to see.

Ok. Got some better raid numbers for Victorious Concerto. The power is now going off consistently, so I was able to us it in a raid; PC's Abom Lab. Based on those numbers, at first it looked like the devs stealth patched the multiplier from 5% of ten second damage back to 10% of ten second damage. However, a closer look and follow-up with a training dummy shows this not to be the case. During the raid, VC was proccing for an average of 7400 damage; as opposed to after the raid with a training dummy when it was proccing for 3200. Obviously, some of this is due to an increase to my damage from raid buffs. However, looking at my short-term dps in the 10 seconds while recording in the raid vs my short-term dps while recording on a training dummy, a simple increase in dps can't account for anywhere near the amount of this 130% increase. Ie; was parsing around 7400 dps against the training dummy and around 9500 in the raid; short term.Hypothesis: The multiplier Victorious Concerto is using isn't consistent. Perhaps the devs have changed the multiplier to from 5% to 10% while in groups or raids. Tested this with a bot and a training dummy. Did same test with a creature conjuror for verification. It doesn't look like the multiplier increases in a group. Perhaps the multiplier increases only in the raid. If anyone can show why VC is proccing for 3200 solo, but 7400 in raid, I would be grateful.So, lets update the earlier evaluation based on this new info. Keep in mind that this analysis applies to the raid context only and assumes that VC is going to be proccing for around 7400. Interestingly, it appears that crit multiplier and perhaps crit % do affect VC. Sorcerers in the raid were proccing VC for an average of 9600 damage while the brig, Illu and I were only proccing for around 7400. Otoh, the brig, Illu and I got about 100 procs raid-wide off of VC, while the Sorcerers only got around 50 procs; likely due to their increased casting times. PCs lab is a good place to evaluate VC because it is full of solo mobs. However, I still need to do a good analysis of VC against large groups of mobs when the mage group is spamming aoes.In any case, we will use the following assumptions for this evaluation:Two sorcerers proccing VC 5 times per use for 9600 damage/proc = 96000 damageBard and 2 other dps proccing VC 10 times per use for 7400 damage/proc = 222000 damageSo, total proc damage per use of VC: 318,000 damage(Close observers will note that faster casting classes are getting significantly more advantage from VC than sorcerers; which implies that dirges will likely get somewhat better numbers out of VC than a troub in a dedicated mage group.)Updating our earlier analysis for raid-use only, it appears that Victorious Concerto will now proc for a total of 318,000 damage during a 10 second period. So, dropping off all the bells and whistles and based on a hands-on analysis of actual raid use:Casting time :4 secondsDescription: Does magic damage equal to 318,000So a single click spell that does 318k damage for the group is pretty darn awesome.However, let's now divide that 100k to 180 k by the 5 minute recast timer318,000 / (300 seconds)Hence, we arrive at the total raid impact of the new bard endline ability; which is a long-term 1080 dps increase group-wide; for comparison, Aria of Magic provides a 1250 point dps increase group-wide.So we got a 4 second cast time (2 autoattack swings lost) ability that does 1080 dps group-wide or 270 dps per second of cast time; that's not too bad. Our arguably most efficient spell; Perfect shrill has a cast time of 1/2 second and does about 310 dps or 610 dps per second of cast time. If we discount the long-term efficiency due to the long re-use timer and assuming that we're only going to us it once, on a short fight, it's doing 318k group-wide with a 4 second casting timer or 79.5k damage per second of casting time. Much better than in the earlier analysis, however most tier 1 dps still have several abilities that contribute about this much or more; ie assassinate. However, most such abilities are short-term 1 shot abilities and don't provide the sustained damage increase VC appears to provide. Keep in mind also that the 318k damage is spread out over 10 seconds, so the short-term burst effect is only to increase group-wide dps by 31.8k. In fact, this is perhaps an even better no bells and whistles description of VC:Casting time: 4 secondsRecast time: 5 minutesDescription: Increases group-wide dps by 31.8 k magic damage for 10 seconds.Based on this analysis, I have respecced VC into my regular raid AA setup.I still believe VC to be a bit lackluster compared to some of the other class endlines. I think the short-term burst damage potential is about where it should be; somewhat impressive but not imbalancing in the short term. But the long recast time still takes the cumulative effect of this ability from being a nice 'endgame' ability back to being a weakened Aria of Magic or a gimped PotM. Aria of magic provided a 1250 dps increase to the group and PotM increased group-wide dps by 1620 and raidwide dps by 4060. Meanwhile, VC only provides a 1050 dps increase.The devs should really consider dropping the reuse timer on VC down to no more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds and making either Rhythmic Overture or VC an instant cast ability. This isn't going to effect the short-term burst damage it generates in any way and will put it in line when compared with Aria and PotM. The casting speed increase is really needed because as it stands, solo casting this is pretty worthless. Casting Rhythmic Overture counts as an attack, so throwing the whole Rhythmic Overture/VC combo takes a total of 4 seconds. Because casting VC isn't an attack, it is possible to game the system by casting RO on one mob and then using the recorded damage number to trigger VC on another mob, thereby reducing the effective casting time to 2 seconds. However, this trick is so situational as to be negligible.As noted earlier, VC is proccing 3200 damage when cast solo and normally lands about 10 times during the 10 second period it is up. So, VC generates 32,000 points of damage. However, to generate those 32,000 points of damage, you have to do nothing but cast RO/VC for 4 full seconds. No auto-attacks or anything else; for 4 seconds your dps is effectively zero. So, by doing the math....32000/4 = 8000. Casting RO/VC increases my dps from the around 7200 dps to 8000 dps. I dunno about you, but having the ability to increase your solo dps by around 10% for 10 seconds once every five minutes is pretty [Removed for Content].

I'm seeing better results while solo on training dummies. VC is all about preparing for it, and it's highly worth it to do so. Out in the wild, it's really hard to get a good solo VC because fights are over so fast. I didn't save any dummy parses because I felt I could get better, but I do have a group parse.Protector Ghondu: (00:42) | 2962827 | 70544 | [Mecerian-Assassinate-67599]Assassin | 1105120 | 26312Dirge | 589569 | 14037Inquisitor | 381562 | 9085Paladin | 323557 | 7704Warlock | 296100 | 7050Illusionist | 266919 | 6355This is the first named in the Hole: Demetrik's Bastion, the ghoul with two rats. As you can see our casters weren't so great. Here's how much damage VC did for all of them. I went back and looked at number of hits and average hit.Assassin | 119898 | 15 | 7993.2 Dirge | 76061 | 10 | 7606.1 Inquisitor | 53528 | 8 | 6691 Paladin | 47760 | 10 | 4776 Warlock | 38173 | 5 | 7634.6 Illusionist | 53783 | 10 | 5378.3It did a total of 389203 damage. It was up for both of the rats you need to burn quickly. And... we did. It did 5.76x the damage of Assassinate. How long is that timer? VC is out dpsing it. So that makes me very satisfied with our new ability.

I would still appreciate it if someone else could run some solo VC numbers on a training dummy to confirm my results. I understand the buffs in a group or raid and the mitigation debuffs on the mob could account for some of the discrepancy I'm seeing between solo and raid procs. However, I think there's something else going on. Perhaps it's just the mitigation debuffs and VC is getting double dinged by mitigation, once when recording on RO and then a second time when VC is being partially mitigated.Btw, your results pretty much confirm mine; 387203 damage once every 5 minutes or 1290 dps group-wide. So VC is contributing about as much group-wide damage as Aria; 1250 or PotM; 1015.

Got it to do 41988 on a training dummy. Hit 10 times for an average of 4198.80. DPS was 7960.34 and VC was 15% at 1199.66 dpsI will get more.Edit:49804, hit for 12 times at 4150.33 a pop. DPS was 9269.53 and VC was 18% at 1660.13 dps.Did another two for about the same. This is the most I squeeze out on a dummy it looks.

Still not sure why testing seems to indicate that RO/VC is doing a proc ~ 5% of dps vs training dummies but ~10% of dps in groups/raids. Tried testing against a training dummy with a bot, still procced for ~5%.Btw, thanks for clarification earlier on fact that RO is putting a detrimental on ONE mob that records the damage on that mob and only that mob. At the same time, VC proc affects all attacks, even aoes. Which, if any, components of our dps are being excluded from the damage recording of RO? Autoattack, Combat Arts, Spell Attacks, Procs? Also, which types of attacks will VC proc off of?

Here's my new high VC parse. I'm really suprised at it too, because my overall parse was pretty low (no enchanter and low group dps).TYPE DAMAGE EXT DPS AVERAGE MIN HIT MAX HIT RESIST HITS CRIT % SWINGS TO HIT % All 778220 11972.62 4074.45 684 17177 All 191 88% 200 95.50 Victorious Concerto 155925 2398.85 14175.00 14175 14175 magic 11 100% 11 100.00The group did155952 (me) avg hit 14175.00 (105ish crit chance, 46.5 crit bonus, 33.5 potency)84326 (brigand) avg hit 9369.5677247 (guardian) avg hit 8583.0036572 (ranger, probably the worst dps class for VC) avg hit 9143.0047640 (templar) avg hit 9528.00149114 (necromancer) avg hit 10651.00Total of 550851 damage.

It procs for 9k on the regular for me.

in my guild, us bards try to have a little fun... we have a friendly competition going to see who can get the highest VC hit (not dps from vc)... so far I'm leading with 21,578 as of 7/14/10, Labs 4x... so people who refuse to believe it works, well it does... and top raiding guilds have it hitting for something like 60k if I remember correctly, which I plan on eventually working towards once my AA is maxed and I have better gear. When it comes to VC though, it's all about your casting order of things!also for those talking about it in groups... mine tends to be somewhere near 14 on average in normal groups... when i remember to use it <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

So what is or would be the optimal casting order when using RO and then VC in order to maximize dmg output?

So what is or would be the optimal casting order when using RO and then VC in order to maximize dmg output?Edit: sorry for the duplicate post, browser messed up trying to post this question

Optimal casting order (courtesy of buffrat): Auto -> Daro's, Sinister or Darksong -> Auto -> Bump, Kiss -> Auto -> Evasive, Darksong or Thuri's or Howl -> Auto -> Luda's, Daro's -> Auto generally.. As for the recording, procs etc. don't effect the VC damage, just Autoattacks and abilities. DA's don't affect the damage, neither do flurry's.

While often useful for increasing burst damage, especially near the end of the mobs' life, it is not as good as it might look on paper - especially on raids.Because so many of the raid mobs cast aoe's, interupt, run around randomly etc etc it is often much harder to max out RO/VC on real mobs than on a training dummy, which does not move and does not hit back.On a recent Tox raid, my high parses for it were good, but there were also a lot of low ones - RO does not have much chance to build up when you are getting knocked back. Overall for the entire zone showed it way down the list, about 1% of the total damage. Other zones would be better, others worse - but overall I think I would rather have something else.

Dont underestimate this buff. Due to crit bonus and potency being applied twice (once during RO and once during VC) the damage output will increase with better gear quicker then any other attack or spell in the game.During a good VC i can get each proc to do 40-50k giving me a total damage of 200-400k for one use. Others do about the same amount in my group so the total damage will be around 1mil-1.5mil. If you gravitas yourself and ask for RoA or jcap before using Vc you can get the recast down to 3-3.5min.1 milion damage every 3 minutes, tell me another ability that can compete with that=P

For full burn fights i always get between 70-100k vc procs myself, on groups or other names that i don't dps as high on i pull off between 40-60k procs

VC procs for around 150k for me, 10 to 14 times.

<cite>Gaige wrote:</cite><blockquote>VC procs for around 150k for me, 10 to 14 times.</blockquote>Bah,, best ive seen VC proc for me is 70kish but average is like 35kish <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />