Flayedskin

Casting and recovery timer dependent on AA setup. The CA's I was thinking about were Barroom Negotiation which has a base 1 sec cast time (unsure of recovery again not logged on) and Hideaway which is a 1 second cast timer as well base. Sneak can be a 1 to 2 second cast timer base depending on aa setup.

Johnathon

Most Brigand damage combat arts except thuggish negotiations (only brigand blue ae spell) have a default casting time of .5 and a recovery of .5 seconds.

Casting is the time it takes the bar to go from the left to the right.
Recovery is the time in between attacks when NOTHING can happen. YOU CAN NOT AUTO ATTACK DURING RECOVERY!

Even if you have a combat art queued up, you will automatically auto attack if its due.

the reason some people say 'TIME IT' is to maximize their WEAPON and proc damage potential.

I'm gonna bust out the ASCII art for you all.

With the understanding that most brigand ca's are .5 casting and .5 recovery time,

That means you can swing your weapons at a minimum of once every second.

Every * is where a swing can happen.

Every # is where a swing WILL happen

If your spamming combat arts and your DW weapon delay ends up being 2.1 seconds this is why you wait that extra .1 second pause.

What this means for you if you decide to spam and not wait.

You will hit a combat art, and queue the next one
Swing not up.. you hit another,
Swing not up, you hit another... SWING IS QUEUED for the .9 seconds
your DW weapons swing and do their damage then the next queued combat art is automatically cast after the swings have happened.

The problem with timings.

If you have steady HASTE (pretty much locked at a certain percentage) then you do have a rhythm that you develop and start doing more damage on your parse, but the moment that variable items come into play and your haste starts fluctuating like Oprah trying to lose weight, then its becomes almost impossible (without some serious attention to your buff bar on TOP of everything else you need to do on a fight) to time.

This is why most brigs say screw it and just spam to their hearts content. Moving and staying behind the add/mob is always more beneficial to a brigand unless weapon delays go to the 9 second range (which i seriously doubt).

Hence the reason why rangers are required to align their spells according to what they believe their haste is going to be for the majority of the fight.


I believe if someone was good enough in programming, that developing a custom plug-in for ACT would be possible to take into account everything and just give you a radial icon that would make auto attack timing much simpler (this will become possible with LU44) until that day comes to light, Spam away!

BTW, im not writing the plug in and sorry about the rambling ;)

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Choadley

But, for everyone with Sailwind that won't entirely accurate, which is almost everyone. Point still stands...

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Lord Pantz

Fuck I thought I was reading the swashbuckler forums for a second.

Spam motherfuckers. Spam.

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Ninibi

Recently I was advocating timing. The theory I had heard was that your CA's can interrupt your autoattack swing & I had noticed a jump in dps.

Then ADHD kicked in and like a diet plan gone to hell, I went back to my old ways, but remembered to get in sinister strike before doubleup.

DPS hasn't suffered since & is still going up according to group setup, buffs, upgrades and gear. I was probably napping at the wheel and had a buff I wasn't used to.

I notice a bigger jump when I remember to refresh poisons.

So.
Crow.
I eats it!

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lyasa

is always sad when i forget to refresh poisons and start wondering why my dps dropped. then i refresh and beat other brig (cause i got better buffs, and probably slightly quicker on the uptake)

Orochan

True.

False.

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Mendanbar

Whenever anyone talks about timing ca's, they're referring to doing so using higher delay weapons (3.5 seconds or greater). It's simply not worth even coming close to considering with anything faster, you will have to pause too often to wait for an attack and not chain ca's. With the higher delay weapons, if people ARE trying to time autoattacks, they will usually put 2-3 ca's (depending on your casting speed buffs) between each autoattack swing. Because of this, you should effectively pretty much never have an issue with CA's coming up too fast. I pretty much always find myself out of CA's at one point or another, unless I have to concern myself with something other than just parking and blasting DPS, like jousting or the like.

Many brigands just don't bother with trying too hard to time ca's simply because A) ca's are such a huge portion of our damage comparitively, and B) because of double up. With a swashbuckler, timing ca's makes far more sense because you have other factors that make autoattack SO MUCH more important than it is for us brigs. Inspiration and Hurricane proc only off of main hand autoattack swings, and their CAs are far weaker than ours. Because of that, it is FAR more important for them to make sure they get EVERY single autoattack swing in that they can. For us, it's an either way thing. Odds are you're going to have some natural breaks anyway if you try to do doublets or triplets of CA's and you can probably get autoattacks in that way almost accidentally.

Either way, one thing is certain, whether you intentionally slow your ca usage down to get maximized autoattacks or not... NEVER SLOW CA's IN YOUR DOUBLE UP CHAIN. Period. The damage gained by maximizing double up will own the crap out of making certain that you get an autoattack off .5 seconds earlier. If you can get a good casting chain set up and some casting speed buffs, you can easily get 4 ca's in on a double up, which, including sinister strike can easily be in the ballpark of 20-30k spike damage if not higher.

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Chix

I said recovery time brah.

(And I dont need to look at no hotbars to tell you cast times of brigand abilities)


My bad yo. That sentence should of course be ignored.

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Dakis

Well I can parse 7k (yellow mobs) with timing my autoattacks the best to my ability, or I can parse 5k in the same fight by just spamming. Sure you might get lucky while spamming, but you're never going to be the best possible by just hitting buttons and hoping your autoattacks go off.