Fire DPS worse than Lightning DPS in raids

Runiya · 07-01-2009, 10:05 AM

Hi,

I came to the conclusion that using a rotation of lightning spells (with lightning traits equipped) will do (much) more damage to bosses than using fire damage.

I think either the fire damage trait system or spells are broken, or maybe they just suck, or maybe lightning is overpowered, but at the moment I'm using lightning attacks in fellows / raids.

My ceaseless argument has a crit rate of about 40% and crits for 600-800 damage. On top of this I have the +lightning damage ( level 3 ) on my weapon and some nice +35% lightning crit damage and the -resist rating.
My other lightning spells crit for about 1200 damage each.
I don't use epic conclusion a lot since the crit rating on it is too low compared to my ceaseless argument and uses too much power.

With fire spells I also noticed I would run out of power quite early on, and with lightning I don't even come close to running low power at any time in the fight.

Syllythir · 07-01-2009, 02:11 PM

I just posted about Fire vs. Lightning on one of the other threads and, i have to say, our viewpoints are slightly different on the subject.

Certainly with the right LI (and traits) you're going to be critting like crazy on CA but, unfortunately, i've not been fortunate to find one that's got the right combination of legacies including the crit factor with the other items i look for.

I guess it comes down to play style though as, on the bigger mobs, i like to use a range of skills to give the group/raid the benefit of our debuffs (slowed attack speed, reduced tactical resistance, reduced evade rating etc) as well as the DoTs and ofc the lightning DPS. As we're not exactly the main DPS dealers i personally feel that, whilst we can contribute to bringing down the target, it's a shame to waste some good skills in the pursuit of purely DPSing.

That being said, the Fire DoTs are incredibly power efficient, especially in comparison to the Frost skills which eat power faster than anyone could keep up with. Writ of Fire tier 3 for example, will be hitting for 190 every tick over 20 seconds for a combined power cost of 250 or so. Getting there might take a little while but in the pursuit of power conservation Fire skills are a winning range imo.

Again, it comes down to playing style and LIs but i just thought an alternative viewpoint on the Fire vs Lightning/insta DPS vs DoT debate might be worthwhile

SouledOut · 07-01-2009, 11:35 PM

Drop a LM into the mix with his -fire mitigation skills = more dps from your fire DoTs. Of course getting suitable legacies and using a fire spec will help too

Played my RK up to 21 so far and lightning definitely chews on the power when spamming skills but results in a faster kill whereas fire DoTs live up to their name and pack their punch over time, especially with the Writ since it helps to tier it up a bit. In a raid steady dps is much better than insane crits and damage spikes to avoid getting agro - a very useful lesson I learned from playing hunter as my main for 18 months.

Runiya · 08-01-2009, 07:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SouledOut

Drop a LM into the mix with his -fire mitigation skills = more dps from your fire DoTs. Of course getting suitable legacies and using a fire spec will help too

Played my RK up to 21 so far and lightning definitely chews on the power when spamming skills but results in a faster kill whereas fire DoTs live up to their name and pack their punch over time, especially with the Writ since it helps to tier it up a bit. In a raid steady dps is much better than insane crits and damage spikes to avoid getting agro - a very useful lesson I learned from playing hunter as my main for 18 months.

At level 21 the RK play style is quite different from level 60 play style.
My RK is full radiance set, I have enough second-age weapons to equip an army of RKs so I have a wide choice of which spell to use.
I am quite aware of the fact that technically fire should be doing more damage ( why add it otherwise ? ). I found that lightning will do more damage however.
I'll try and do a DPS log and analyze the DPS over time from both skills, using the right traits at each try ( also the right weapon ). Maybe that should give a definitive answer to this riddle.
I heard that RK's will be changed in book7, so everything might change again.
Tactical damage will be changed ( in our favor ) but RK's will also get a nerf ( don't know which one though ).
Guess we'll hear about it soon.

SouledOut · 08-01-2009, 08:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Runiya

I'll try and do a DPS log and analyze the DPS over time from both skills, using the right traits at each try ( also the right weapon ). Maybe that should give a definitive answer to this riddle.

That may well be the problem - lightning skills seem more tailored to burst dps at the expense of power (and therefore higher Damage Per Second due to damage spikes) whereas fire is constant damage over time (and likely lower overall DPS, due to the nature of DoTs).

A test I'd be interested to see for both builds is power cost vs damage output for yourself using damage skills, overall damage output for a group run and a third test using debuffs and utility skills in a group run. Should give a nice overview of the damage you can do in the most common situations and see whether debuffing has a greater overall effect.

As for my level 21... 3 mobs aren't so challenging now so level 60 will be interesting. It actually feels a lot like playing a Tempest of Set/Necromancer hybrid from AoC, the only thing different is the name and damage type on some of the skills - fire DoTs instead of unholy :P

cthun · 08-01-2009, 09:02 AM

No need for parsing fire dps, I know my numbers. I'm fire-specced and decently equipped, though not top-end.

The absolute peak dps are achieved by the Wof(3)-EoF-SW combo, which takes at least 13 seconds, that is if you have no aggro and get no resists. Damage vs. lvl 60 is in the order of

3x180 (WoF, 4s ticks)
3x250 (EoF, 3s)
8x190 (SW, 1s)

Sums up to 2810/13 = 216 dps. This is the PEAK I can do with fire.

For comparison, here are some data about AVERAGE dps from the lotro.com forum:

Average runekeeper dps at lvl60 seems to be around 180-200. I can confirm this from my experience.

Absolute high-end lightning runekeeper (with top legacies and 2 adamants of dreams) at full battle attunement: 282 dps

Healing-specced Captain: 290 dps

Same Captain going for maximum damage: 400 dps

Hunters at lvl 50: 290 dps
Hunters at lvl 60: No actual data yet, but people expect the dps to have nearly doubled, so most certainly more than 500 dps.

Mcginty · 08-01-2009, 09:25 AM

<edit> superfluous post

<edit> see above

I'm sure its more DPS (maxxed) than that.
Don't forget that the fire is DoT and you'll still be spamming frost and lightning skills.
With all my DoTs on a mob 3xWoF, EoF and SW I 'can'* drop a +3200 mob in the time it takes Smoldering Wrath to channel. Granted that would be minus 200/500 or so from skills used to get the attunement maxed. So say 2700 over 10secs

That's still 270dps in DoTs alone.

This interests me and I'm NOT sure of my figures lol. Need to run some tests.

**excluding resists

Runiya · 08-01-2009, 10:56 AM

as soon as the servers come up I'll do a DPS parse.
I'm pretty sure my healing traited RK is well over 280DPS. I'll try and find a 10K mob somewhere ( not really representative but I don't wanna spend time chugging pots or using stun spells either ). Then , for sake of comparison, I will ask a captain and a champion to kill that same mob, and I'll ask them to also parse their DPS , on the same mob. It will be interesting to see the results.

cthun · 08-01-2009, 01:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mcginty

Don't forget that the fire is DoT and you'll still be spamming frost and lightning skills.

No you won't, that's exactly the problem. "Dps" is a simple linear system, all that matters is total damage vs. casting time for each spell. If you throw in a spark during fire spells, you could do the exact same thing during lightning spells. CDs don't matter since we have more than enough spells to rotate. So let me for the moment define "dps" or "+dps" as total dmg per casting time.
(This might be a bit confusing at first: "+dps" of different spells don't sum up but average out, weighted by casting time)

SW does 190 dps
WoF...depends on duration of the fight, but hardly more than 1000/(3x1.5s) = 220 dps
EoF...3-5 ticks, not sure...so some 1000/3s = 330 dps

Now I looked again at the US thread, and in fact the 282 dps result was obtained without a single fire spell, while the 190 dps guy used a mixture of fire and lightning. This proves that pure lightning, at least when optimized for crits, does far more dps then Smouldering Wrath.

In fact, SW is a pretty bad dps option at full battle attunement. EoF-t3 might be best, but it requires 5 additional seconds of casting WoF, which in turn does less damage per casting time than pure lightning. (And EoF can take far longer to cast than 3s when aggroed.)

In some situations (long fights) you might want to get up WoF-t3 and EoF-t3, which average for some 2k/7.5s=266 dps (while the 282 pure lightning dps was absolute top equip). But you really should cast lightning in between, not the 190 dps SW.

Runiya · 08-01-2009, 05:42 PM

Ok,

I did a simplistic test against a captain kinmate of mine. He's got reasonable gear for DPS , no idea what exactly. He does slightly more DPS than my RK.
I came out at 283 DPS. I killed a 17500 morale mob in about 1 minute 3 seconds, he killed the same mob in 1 minute 1 seconds. ( same level , same mob ).
I got plenty resists though, at one time 4 resists in a row ( lol )
I have -900 ( trait + weapon ) target all skills resist.

End of story I guess.

btw: that 283DPS was using lightning only spells.
If I use firespells I come much lower. The test mob was an Auroch in Ettenmoores about 16-17K health.

07-01-2009, 10:05 AM	#1 (permalink)
Runiya Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Netherlands Posts: 63	Fire DPS worse than Lightning DPS in raids Hi, I came to the conclusion that using a rotation of lightning spells (with lightning traits equipped) will do (much) more damage to bosses than using fire damage. I think either the fire damage trait system or spells are broken, or maybe they just suck, or maybe lightning is overpowered, but at the moment I'm using lightning attacks in fellows / raids. My ceaseless argument has a crit rate of about 40% and crits for 600-800 damage. On top of this I have the +lightning damage ( level 3 ) on my weapon and some nice +35% lightning crit damage and the -resist rating. My other lightning spells crit for about 1200 damage each. I don't use epic conclusion a lot since the crit rating on it is too low compared to my ceaseless argument and uses too much power. With fire spells I also noticed I would run out of power quite early on, and with lightning I don't even come close to running low power at any time in the fight.

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07-01-2009, 02:11 PM	#2 (permalink)
Syllythir Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 81	I just posted about Fire vs. Lightning on one of the other threads and, i have to say, our viewpoints are slightly different on the subject. Certainly with the right LI (and traits) you're going to be critting like crazy on CA but, unfortunately, i've not been fortunate to find one that's got the right combination of legacies including the crit factor with the other items i look for. I guess it comes down to play style though as, on the bigger mobs, i like to use a range of skills to give the group/raid the benefit of our debuffs (slowed attack speed, reduced tactical resistance, reduced evade rating etc) as well as the DoTs and ofc the lightning DPS. As we're not exactly the main DPS dealers i personally feel that, whilst we can contribute to bringing down the target, it's a shame to waste some good skills in the pursuit of purely DPSing. That being said, the Fire DoTs are incredibly power efficient, especially in comparison to the Frost skills which eat power faster than anyone could keep up with. Writ of Fire tier 3 for example, will be hitting for 190 every tick over 20 seconds for a combined power cost of 250 or so. Getting there might take a little while but in the pursuit of power conservation Fire skills are a winning range imo. Again, it comes down to playing style and LIs but i just thought an alternative viewpoint on the Fire vs Lightning/insta DPS vs DoT debate might be worthwhile

07-01-2009, 11:35 PM	#3 (permalink)
SouledOut Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 158	Drop a LM into the mix with his -fire mitigation skills = more dps from your fire DoTs. Of course getting suitable legacies and using a fire spec will help too Played my RK up to 21 so far and lightning definitely chews on the power when spamming skills but results in a faster kill whereas fire DoTs live up to their name and pack their punch over time, especially with the Writ since it helps to tier it up a bit. In a raid steady dps is much better than insane crits and damage spikes to avoid getting agro - a very useful lesson I learned from playing hunter as my main for 18 months.

08-01-2009, 09:02 AM	#6 (permalink)
cthun Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Germany Posts: 77	No need for parsing fire dps, I know my numbers. I'm fire-specced and decently equipped, though not top-end. The absolute peak dps are achieved by the Wof(3)-EoF-SW combo, which takes at least 13 seconds, that is if you have no aggro and get no resists. Damage vs. lvl 60 is in the order of 3x180 (WoF, 4s ticks) 3x250 (EoF, 3s) 8x190 (SW, 1s) Sums up to 2810/13 = 216 dps. This is the PEAK I can do with fire. For comparison, here are some data about AVERAGE dps from the lotro.com forum: Average runekeeper dps at lvl60 seems to be around 180-200. I can confirm this from my experience. Absolute high-end lightning runekeeper (with top legacies and 2 adamants of dreams) at full battle attunement: 282 dps Healing-specced Captain: 290 dps Same Captain going for maximum damage: 400 dps Hunters at lvl 50: 290 dps Hunters at lvl 60: No actual data yet, but people expect the dps to have nearly doubled, so most certainly more than 500 dps.

08-01-2009, 10:56 AM	#8 (permalink)
Runiya Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Netherlands Posts: 63	as soon as the servers come up I'll do a DPS parse. I'm pretty sure my healing traited RK is well over 280DPS. I'll try and find a 10K mob somewhere ( not really representative but I don't wanna spend time chugging pots or using stun spells either ). Then , for sake of comparison, I will ask a captain and a champion to kill that same mob, and I'll ask them to also parse their DPS , on the same mob. It will be interesting to see the results.

08-01-2009, 05:42 PM	#10 (permalink)
Runiya Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Netherlands Posts: 63	Ok, I did a simplistic test against a captain kinmate of mine. He's got reasonable gear for DPS , no idea what exactly. He does slightly more DPS than my RK. I came out at 283 DPS. I killed a 17500 morale mob in about 1 minute 3 seconds, he killed the same mob in 1 minute 1 seconds. ( same level , same mob ). I got plenty resists though, at one time 4 resists in a row ( lol ) I have -900 ( trait + weapon ) target all skills resist. End of story I guess. btw: that 283DPS was using lightning only spells. If I use firespells I come much lower. The test mob was an Auroch in Ettenmoores about 16-17K health.