Kino

take off all your gear. look at potm or aria. put on a piece that has spell damage. look at the difference.

and honestly, a shield CAN be a good choice if you have a really good main hand such as ayonic axe and you're stamina spec'd OR if you prefer to do ranged, you can pick up some nice effects from a shield. such as the haste on faceless shield. Personally, if i had access to two really good weapons, i definately would not use a shield. but theres a lot of people out there who are either not raiding or have not gotten good raid drops that could benefit just as much from the right shield as any off hand that they use.

and the reason i use the faceless shield instead of a different haste item is because thats the one spot that i can really fit it in. mastercrafted haste cloak is ok, but the one that adds base spell damage is better and the collection item haste belt is also good, but i prefer to use the one that procs group power and has spell damage on it. Not because it increases my dps by a ton or whatever, but because its more useful to my group than me doing an extra 50dps. Im also pretty damn sure that the +base spell damage affects aria and potm.

Dants

+spell damage does not affect PoTM/AoM
+spell crit does affect them
+base damage does affect them
+INT affects them

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Alter Ego

My bad, when I said PoTM/AoM don't receive +spell bonuses, I meant just dmg. Of course spell crit would apply.

Now, before I brought up this thread I went for a +melee stuff setup, with the exception of that +35 Str +35 Int +125 Spell Dmg earring you can get off of the broker for like a plat, and a +85 spell dmg wrist item (something of doom, but not the tormented one).

So thing is, I got about 31% melee crit, about 17% spell crit, and at work so can't add up the +spell or CA dmg numbers. My dps are around 1.5k average. This means sometimes I hit 2k+ (on raids), and sometimes just 1.1k (on lazy grouping).

My gear highlights include:
- Carotidcutter.
- Chain Leggins of the Lyrist.
- The very nice, easy to get and often overlooked Wristwraps of the Culinary Apprentice

Blatantly and swiftly ditched:
- Taleweaver stuff. An insult to bards. Compare it with the Predator or Rogue gear... wtf we get? +sneaking speed bonus?...
- Anaphylaxis. Piece of crap.

Anyway, somebody above asked for a comparison, tell you what, I've been trying the +melee gear for a month or so already, and watched countless parses. I'm now going to give the +spell gear a shot, specially since I do have plenty of the items you guys listed in the bank, like the Fish Embroidered Gloves, etc.

Imma be posting the comparison results in a few days, after watching some more "countless parses" :-) Stay tuned! :-)