Pinion vs Epic Sapphire Sting

[Fisto Mk I]

You can't lick your elbow.

Arguaaaable again... my online translator give so many means for "elbow"... ?

 

[Ying]

Correct for solo, partially correct/usual incorrect with group (group depends), clearly incorrect even for PUG raid group. If any other group member have Vuln, you provide more damage with Ooze, not less.

Pick a lane and stop moving goalposts just to argue. Unless you're spending $$$$ on Tenser's Boxes, you have one sentient jewel that's maxed out or close to being maxed out. You build for all situations, and primarily the one you do the most.

You don't bring Ooze to raids because the Oozes *will* take aggro from the tank. In a raid situation, Dust will be covered by melee especially the TWF varieties. Choosing Dust when there's already Dust means that other debuffs are less likely to be present. If you don't have Vuln, then you aren't getting 20% additional damage from 33 sneak attack dice and 15 imbue dice.

Soloing is a completely different discussion. I wouldn't use a build that relies on 33 sneak attack damage. I'd focus on imbues instead.

 

[Ying]

Great builds! Curious if your most recent build with the 1 paladin level and more imbue dice is dramatically better than your older builds with 2 Warlock.

1 Paladin is more player friendly than 2 Warlock. I saw plenty of people use the Warlock version on Khyber, but they weren't using Consume Shadows for the debuff. That's the whole point. The 1 Paladin also gives you an imbue that applies to everything. And since you have 15 imbue dice, you don't want it to see immunity messages.

 

[Ying]

R10 legendary quests are the normal reaper XP difficulty level. I do just fine in them. I don't think much of the community struggles on R1s now.

I have to wonder what color the sky is in your world if you think much of the community struggles on R1. The forums are a decent cross representation, and most forum posters are afraid/not confident to run reaper even at 1 skull.

I'd also make the argument that your focus solely on DPS is not an ideal path for players to follow since it hinders the character in other ways, specifically in party utility and survivability. Max DPS is great for you in idealized groups with other 156 reaper point professional players. There is no one-size-fits-all all.

What party utility are you expecting here? The build excels at trapping, being able to get THTH boxes on R1 which are still 120 DC. In Shiradi, you can provide a little bit of healing if the actual healer gets beaten up. But even that's mitigated now that they can self-heal fine when out of combat in R10.

And guess what? The toon I played that bow on for more than a year doesn't have 156 reaper points. He barely had wings when I started.

 

[Teh_Troll]

I have to wonder what color the sky is in your world if you think much of the community struggles on R1. The forums are a decent cross representation, and most forum posters are afraid/not confident to run reaper even at 1 skull.

I'm curious to this, the above statement does not match what I've observered (I've seen the opposite, absolute garbage players with reaper wings are common).

 

[Marshal_Lannes]

Agreed. I can't speak to what goes on with Khyber but on Orien R1 is the absolute minimum standard. More and more heroic leveling groups are R3-4. When there are Normal LFMs they have one or two people in them. Could more people be running N/H/E solo or in closed groups? Sure. But the LFM leveling meta on Orien is absolutely R1.

And yes, this conversation went a bit off-topic, but I think we did demonstrate that there is no hard consensus on the best bow to use. Perhaps the real answer is that any of the bows discussed in this thread will be more than capable of taking a ranged build through R4. Easily.

 

[Marshal_Lannes]

1 Paladin is more player friendly than 2 Warlock. I saw plenty of people use the Warlock version on Khyber, but they weren't using Consume Shadows for the debuff. That's the whole point. The 1 Paladin also gives you an imbue that applies to everything. And since you have 15 imbue dice, you don't want it to see immunity messages.

If you are taking Paladin you aren't using the chaotic Chaosbow. The Paladin imbue has a lot more going for it ever since the nerfs to Arcane Archer imbues.

 

[PraetorPlato]

Just eat the neg level-it's a item negative level, so ignorable.

 

[Oliphant]

https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/yings-reaper-bow.271/#post-3125

 

[Fisto Mk I]

If you are taking Paladin you aren't using the chaotic Chaosbow. The Paladin imbue has a lot more going for it ever since the nerfs to Arcane Archer imbues.

Absolutely nothing prevent you to use Pal lvls with Chaosbow or any other chaotic/evil gear. Negative lvl penalty from it just laughable, bonus from best imbue in game much better. I use Epic Litany of the Dead personally on my Pally-shuri toon for combat/ability bonus and just ignore minor penalty from it.

You say you run on Orien mostly... can you named your toons here? I wanna run with you (or mebbe we already run together before?).

 

[Marshal_Lannes]

Seeing a Paladin use a Chaotic bow is like hearing Quint's nails going across the chalkboard in Jaws. I can't stomach it. Should be a loss of Paladin status as it willfully breaks alignment. The game is still D&D for me so I could never endorse anything like this. Obviously, nothing in the game prevents it except one's own code as a Paladin. Everyone's results will vary on that I suppose. I'm not hard to find on Orien. Well, maybe right now it being HC.

 

[Fauxknight]

While pinion and sting are very similar bows (same critical profile, same ranged alacrity); Thornlord doesn't have the alacrity and thus would have to make some assumptions and rough math to compare it to the above mentioned....

Ranged alacrity 20% -> I'm guessing a low-epic bow build without a pinion will have 10% ranged alacrity from some source; so I'm taking this to be about a 9% increase in attack speed, perhaps I should test it instead of guessing.

I though ranged attack speed capped pretty low, making the 20% alacrity overkill. Low epics nets you a full haste item now, like Blackfeather Boots, plus your BAB amd spec, thought that generally maxed it out.