Since there are a few skirmish barter items I want from the Rift, I figured I’d go through a couple of test runs and capture them via Fraps and CStats to do some comparisons. I wanted to not only compare the archer to the sage to see how they rank for DPS but also see how things had changed with the new tier 2 drop rates.
A few notes first concerning my soldiers as they are a bit different, which will skew the numbers a bit unfortunately. My Archer (my Warden’s soldier) is only level 60 with mainly level 54 skills available. And my Minstrel has a 63 Sage with primarily level 56 skills.
I ran it first on my Warden and as the following 2 videos will show I really didn’t have too many issues. I was a bit rusty, but for the most part it was rather smooth.
Now for the encounters and the final battle things were a bit different. I had to do some pretty significant morale surfing as the encounter bosses do hit pretty hard. But in the end, they weren’t terribly touchy and I didn’t have to use my man heal at all. Now the final battle I’m not really quite sure what I was thinking but I did a pretty horrible job in that fight, but oh well I still survived 🙂
I did parse this out in CStats and my Warden’s DPS varied from 120-220 with an average of 153 which is lower then some of my other parses, but the Tier 2 really cranks up all the mob mitigations. Now my archer was parsing around 50 DPS which is about on par with the normal mobs and about half of the encounter/boss mobs.
So after this run, I then flipped over to my Minstrel and gave it a go on him. The combination of being a Tier 2 with its increased mitigations and the Volume 3 resist change made a BIG difference on my Minstrel. I had more problems on the smaller mobs then I did on the encounters, which is backwards from how my Warden was. And in fact, I got a couple of back-to-back waves and did die once during this run. I was also really concerned as you’ll see in the video (~3:20) where I barely hit the Furmurole in time to let Corunir continue but not quick enough to stop the next wave of adds from coming. Luckily the waves that spawned ahead of me didn’t kill him, nor did they try to hunt me down – or that would’ve been really bad. I’m thinking that might be one of the quirks of this skirmish, but I’m not sure 🙂
Now, the CStats data for my Minstrel was quite a bit more interesting then that of my Warden. I averaged 171 DPS for the skirmish but had values ranging from 61 to 573! Now this isn’t terribly surprising as my Minstrel is pretty reliant on big crits for Damage but I wasn’t expecting that big of a swing 😉 And the scary part of that was I only had 1 crit during that 573 DPS fight! 🙂 The low end of that scale was mainly fights where I had to drop War-speech, but I may need to switch tales back to the Armor tale and see how that helps as mainly it was the common damage that was hurting me. My Sage actually varied quite a bit as well from 60-170 with an average of about 75.
Now in looking at the loot drops, I didn’t notice much change in the Campaign mark drops from when I ran this as a Tier 1 during the Epic quest line but I did notice more of everything else. In total for the 2 runs I picked up 2 Veteran Guardian marks, 9 guardian marks, 5 bounty coins, 3 3rd Marks, and 3 campaign marks. So I think I’ll continue to do Tier 2’s on my warden, but I might need to re-think doing them on my Minstrel as there are some nasty resists in there with some of the Lieutenants.
I’ll probably continue to tweak things as this is a fun and rather quick skirmish with rewards that I really want 🙂 Will keep you posted if I come up with any good plans for my Minnie…