Frogdorr

With the frustrations of almost never having proper utility on raid I'm retiring the necro in favor of a dirge.

I am already lvl 45, about 35AA and several masters - obviously they won't matter sooner enough. My question is to you is what do you feel a decent, if not proper spell / CA order should be. I am going STR/WIS AA (I have Wis to the DKTM) and not sure on EoF lines yet, I need help there too.

Goal is to be a solid dirge who can do more that 4-500 ZW (that sound about typical?). Which is going to make me cry and twich from the DPS lovings I do on the necro.

Anyways thanks in advance, Dirges are a blast to play.

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Carvium

AA wise in KoS depends on your guilds requirements or even what they would like to have. I'm currently STR/WIS cos that's what i've been asked to spec. With RoK i'm gunna try INT for a week or 2 and then STA for a week or 2 and see which yields the best results.

For the EOF currently it's luck and degredation lines with the extra 20 i'll probably go for quicker rezin as nothing else really stands out.

500 ZW is a good start and was what i was doing when i first started raiding but there is nothing better than the first time you do over 1k in a fight and when you hit 1kor more ZW.

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WillyWonka

Your AA Build for Raiding does depend on what your guild needs from you. Personally I have Sta/Wis. As I am either in the MT or DPS Group there is always a Swash in group with me that has AW so Blade Dance isn't needed as much as the Dbl Attack.
I had been using Lend Shielding as well, but found it to be unreliable at best so just recently switched back to Sta/Wis/RhythmBlade and not had a raid yet to test that out on.
But typical fights I parse 700-1100. lower end of that in MT group, higher end in DPS Groups. Normal ZW about 800, so not bad but not great.
DoTs are your damage dealers as is Autoattack. Unless it's a large encounter I wouldn't mess with Jarol's. I do use Banshee at the start right after Zander's Debuff followed with Clara's then SoD followed by CoB, then the quick CAs. I can't wait to get better weapons, have had 0 luck with weapon drops on raids.. no GDoH, no RoD, nada.

Something else I found that helps is changing songs mid-fight. If it's a fight that I know from previous experience will be fast, I drop the Power Regen and pick up Tomb's for the dps boost for the group. or if I notice the MT isn't taking much if any damage I ditch Elusion for a more offensive song. With a hotbar dedicated to Group Buffs, it's easy to switch in and out of songs during fights.

And if you ever ever get lumped in a group with a Troub (rare occasions) they put up Precision of The Maestro, cast & cancel your encounter debuffs constantly lol they have a near instant refresh if you're quick and every cast hits the entire encounter and procs PoTM on every target in the encounter.

RogueFrequency

With good weapons you should be able to auto-attack for 500+ dps, so I don't think you are going to have to much to worry about having to work to hard to break your goal dps.

2 common pitfalls of mages becoming scouts:
-Underestimating the benefit of piercing/slashing.
-Not realizing that you might be close enough to a mob to use a CA, but you might not be within auto-attack range. (yes I know that sounds dumb)

-----As you are leveling-----
As for AAs, I'd suggest getting:

KOS
Sta: 4-4-4-8

EOF
Control: 5 jael's, 5 lanet's, 3 fear, 5 wail
Luck: 5 stealth, 3 regen, 5 Tomb's, 5 CoB

The above AAs will give you optimal kiting and soloing ability, which is always nice for leveling and building AA on nameds. If you find groups often, then just do a conventional dirge build.

-----Once you get to raiding level-----
There are plenty of threads on raiding AAs for dirges. The main option at the moment is if you guild needs Bladedance and Degredate. Instead of rehashing this over again I'll refer you to other threads. I will share my OPINIONS on CA/spell orders. I'm not Kall, but I do decent DPS for my class in my gear.

Like a necro, dots are your friend as a dirge. Banshee, Scream of Death, and Infected Blade should be cast ASAP into the pull. Once that is done, cast CoB before your group starts complaining. Between auto-attacks fire off Luda's and Shrieking Stab. Unfortunately there are some CAs/spell aren't even worth using. These are debatable and different dirges will tell you different things. If you are primary debuffer, you should have debuffs cast very soon, if not first, on the pull (on nameds at least).

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Frogdorr

yea I'm quasi-scout ready my first main was assassin - got him to 67 but not before retiring him at 34 to play a necro through 70 and all 4 prismatics =p

this will help for sure and I will make some changes and keep at it, reading the raid threads will come in time as I am a little ways out yet from full raid dirge.

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Krafoogoo

I raid on both Necro (main) and a Dirge - it took me a while to get used to not being top or near the top of the parses.

But I must say, making the parse (occasionally) is much more rewarding as is seeing your grp mates parsing well.

That said, I too played an Assassin through the first 50 levels, and I did forget how tricky both autoattack position is and (while not as bad) finding the back (for SoD).

Have fun with it...

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Juuls

That's my joy in raiding is to get my scouts higher then the mages on parse.

WillyWonka

I try to parse as high as possible in raids.. I look at it this way; the better I'm doing means the better my groupmates are doing as well. if I'm in a DPS group and I'm putting out 900-1000 dps, that means my group who are more dps-based should be doing even more damage.. since all but 1 of our buffs affects the whole group after all ;)

Meistro

get with your other dirges in your guild and find out what AA specs they have. i would suggest having differnt dirge builds based on what others do IE. degen line vs rez lines.

if you really want the extra stats for the tank and your in a tanking group hit up the STR line on the bard tree but if you just wana grab some more group dps go down STA.

in all i think with a dirge you can go a few differnt ways based on your play style and what you like.


right now im double attack (STA) and DKTM for the kos tree and some control/with rez and heal along with luck of the dirge for EoF.

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Meistro

as far as casting orders go i try to go with lots of CoB and getting my dots first off first (Banshee and scream of death) then start of with all the HO's i can get (swindlers luck for skill increase owns) with other CA's spaming waiting for Grims and more dots to refresh.

try to get yourself some haste and 4 delay weapons. currently im about 1.2k dps in MT group and about 1.8k in dps groups (especially if i get hit with TC)

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