Favorable Winds

Recently I've been doing a few Tombs runs after having spent some time doing the Deep and Urgoz's. I've noticed that in the time since I last did the Tombs, people have suddenly gotten all twisted up over the level of Favorable Winds (and Winnow). people will anounce things like "B/P with lvl10 FW LFG". This even got to the ridiculous point of having some guy get mad at me during a run because I was putting up my FW which was only level 10 before he got around to putting up his, which was level 11.
(Although I'm talking about the Tombs here, this applies to almost any place you use FW)

The only things that change when you increase levels in FW are the "level" of the FW (it's health/armor) and the duration. The damage they add does not change.

level 9 - 142 seconds
level 10 - 150 seconds
level 11 - 158 seconds

Here is why, IMHO, the added 8 or 16 seconds is not worth worrying about:

First of all, the level. Yes a lvl11 FW is "stronger" than a lvl9 or 10. In practice however, you don't want, in any case, to put your spirits "in harms way". That is, they should always be in a position where they won't get attacked - because you don't want them to go down during a battle. If they do get attacked, it's not likely that the difference in level will save them.
(I know, there are some instances where spirits are used to block/agro enemies, but that doesn't apply here.)

Secondly, the time. There are 2 considerations here:

1. A large percentage of the time in the Tombs, you move beyond the range of an FW before in dies naturally, and you have to put a new one up anyway.

2. As stated above, you don't want FW to go down in the middle of a battle, so therefore, rather than wait for it to die naturally and then put up another one, it's best to put up fresh ones between mobs and/or whenever you get the chance. The recharge time for FW is only 60 seconds, so this means that long before any of them die naturally, you should be putting up a fresh one anyway.

I'm not really sure, but the lv10 fw is just a reference of how many points the person needs to have in marksmanship, isnt it? Maybe we could check the b/p skills turning points and see if they match with the lv10 fw to be balanced and leaving spare points for utility skills.

While Holy might have a point, I wouldn't put it past some players.....

With Marksmanship at 15, Favorable Winds is level 10.
With Marksmanship at 16, Favorable Winds is level 11.

Now Im no expert on the subject, actually far from it, but I was under the impression the point of B/P was to use mainly Barrage (with a pet of course). And to maximize effectiveness of your Barrage, Marksmanship is generally considered to "need" to be 16, or you are reducing your damage output, and thus the damage output of your team (although by a negligible amount).

I assume his reasoning that having a FW at level 10 really has nothing to do with the level of the spirit, but instead to your rank in Marksmanship.

But then again, who really knows what goes through some peoples heads.

Well you can argue that if you take points out of Marks to put more into BM and Expertise. Then tigers fury lasts longer, and the higher expertise allows you to use barrage more in shorter amounts of time. So while the damage per attack might be less the number of attacks per second might be higher. Possibly high enough to make up for/exceed the one with 16 marks.

I'd argue that most people doing B/P groups either are 12 or have the mental age of 12, and anything that deviates from what that individual thinks is right quite obviously brands you as a noob.
Then the playground effect kicks in and no-one wants to be called a noob so they all fall into-line and soon every "knows" that a lvl X favourable winds quite obviously is the way to go and if you want to do/try something slightly different you become an outcast.

Go try get a group as a A/R critical barrager. There's a strong possibility this does more dmg(no flames please unless someone has the maths to back it up) and yet your chances of getting a group are somewhere around about 0.

^^ heh I'm not flaming, I seriously want to see how a group of A/R's would do. But then I like seeing people go against the "flow".

I group of A/R's wouldn't work well. I try to put one on my team whenever I make one in tombs though.

Considering that the some of the critical barrager's Damage output is the bleeding effect from 'Sharpen Dagger's'. A team of them wouldn't do much. Re-appying bleeding doesn't make it do more damage.

If a noob is complaining about the lv of FW leave that group.

The most important thing about using FW is placement of the spirit and like you said, keep a fresh one up

well it is a Barrage Pet build, and the assassin will have an aweful pet (12 Marks, 13 Crit (needed for breakpoint, lower will give energy problems) and this leaves him with 3 in Beast mastery, points alocated affects tanking ability, gg

not to mention every ranger havign rebirth is a godsend for screw ups


i dont dislike crit barrager, but it is not as effective as a ranger in B/P

Er... whats beast mastery gotta do with the pets ability to take damage? I hate to break it to you, but 95% of all B/P rangers have less than 5 in Beast Mastery anyway, the other 5% include people who for some reason think there pet should stay alive... when in fact they're only there to make minions and block for a little while. (Note i am not including Tigers Fury barragers in that statistic!).

Also if your entire B/P team needs Rebirth... and its a pug... theres a 99% chance some of them will have left before you could Rebirth them all anyway. 2 rangers at the most need Rebirth, if your dedicated 'rebirthers' seem to enjoy getting themselves killed before the rest of the team then bad luck.

I guess bringing an A/R for the bleeding effect could be quite effective.. BUT in most barrage groups... how long do the targets stay alive for? If all 5 rangers go for the same target they're usually dead within 4 seconds... degen hardly matters.

The one thing to remember though is that that bleeding is caused by a critical hit. Assassins get quite a lot more critical hits than every other class due to their attribute that increases their chances of getting one. At a 16 marksmanship, a ranger will get a critical hit approximately 23% of the time. At a 12 marksmanship and a 13 critical strikes an A/R will get a critical hit approximately 17+13=30% of the time. If the assassin has critical eye up, this becomes 36% of the time. Barrage adds 17 damage for a 16 marksmanship and 13 damage for 12 marksmanship..

With a max damage bow a critical hit from the ranger will do approximately (28*1.4)+17 = 56 points of damage (the 1.4 is based upon a critical hit adding a multiplyer of the square root of 2 to the weapons damage, based upon testing performed by ensign)

With a max damage bow a critical hit from the assassin will do approximately (28*1.4)+13 = 52 points of damage (the 1.4 is based upon a critical hit adding a multiplyer of the square root of 2 to the weapons damage, based upon testing performed by ensign).

The assassin does 4 points less damage than the ranger, however, roughly 1 in 3 hits from the assassin will do this damage, as opposed to roughly 1 in 5 by the ranger, making their damage pretty much equal over time.

The bleeding from sharpen daggers, is simply a bonus side effect, sharpen daggers could also be replaced with way of perfection (32 point heal per critical hit at a 13 critical strikes) which would take some pressure off the healer in the group.

I always go with level 11 FW, since my Marksmanship is permanently fixed at 16

As for Winnow, level 8 is good enough, in my opinion.

Yes, as you say, you are apparently no expert. As is pointed out in a later post, by having my Expertise at 13 (BM 9, Marks 15), I can keep up a continual Barrage using Tiger's Fury, and rez my pet whenever it dies, and still not run out of energy. This results in an overall greater damage output, I think, but that's a whole other discussion.

Actually, the point of my original post was the un-importance of the difference between having a level 9, 10 or 11 Favorable Winds. The reason why you have a particular level of FW is not relevant to this discussion.

spirit's level gives you at least an insight bout how a player distributes his points.

i was forming a b/p party in Warcamp for SF farm and there was this b/p ranger whose winnowing is at level 11. if his wilderness is that high, hows his marks and his expertise, i asked.

It is a commonly held opinion that pets are only there to make minions, but I would argue that that is only partially true. Consider this:
Before there are any minions, there are only the pets to act as a meat shield, so they take all the damage and die rather quickly.......minion fodder.
Once the MM has 10 minions (the max), there is no longer any particular reason for the pets to die easily. First of all, a 15 creature meat shield is better than a 10 creature meat shield. Secondly, there should be other enemy corpses around to use as minion fodder.

But the real truth of the matter is that your level in Beast Mastery only affects how much damage the pet does when it attacks, as far as the pet is concerned. The pets own level (e.g. level 20) determines how much health and armor it has, and thusly, how well it can survive.

As I pointed out in my last post, the ability of a pet to tank relies on it's own level, not the Rangers level in Beast mastery.

While having a "hard" rez, such as Rebirth is preferable, it doesn't hurt too much if one or two people only have rez signet for emergencies.

Ahem, no reason for them to die? I can think of two, and they are:

Death Nova
Putrid Explosion

At Marks 16 on a ranger alone and 12 on a sin +16 crit:
33.25 - 50.8 (66.298 33.4% Chance) (Assassin)
40.2875 - 60.47 (78.2927 22.9% Chance) (Ranger)

This assumes they have perfect 15>50 20% customisation bows. Per hit, the Ranger clearly comes out on top easily, while the assassin has only a 10.5% advantage on the critical hit, it's very much like the old sundering mod vs a solid 7-9 Damage increase per hit advantage over the assassin. In retrospect, I can really relate this to calculating sundering vs vampiric except the only advantage to the 10.5% advantage is an extra 6 damage over the Ranger's max (non crit).

Looking at this for the first time myself, I didn't actually realise that a Ranger is still far superior to a Critical Barrage Assassin in DPS.

On the contrary, having at least two Res Signets on the team is much safer than an all-Rebirth party.

It's gotten to the point that I've changed my Orders necro to N/Rt so I can Flesh of my Flesh the monk back up before some idiot breaks off to Rebirth him in mid combat.

I've been saying the same thing about spirits for as long as I've been doing BP.. a long time. Tombs BP is almost a lost art anymore.. to me a 9 level spirit is fine for Winn or FW. What I do have trouble with is the people who bring a spirit because everyone is asking about spirits... then at the wrong moment, after my spirit is raised and well placed, they cast their spirit at the front line and it's a 4th or 5th level spirit ..

I do have a problem also with the folk who think they need sup runes to cast Winn.. I question a player’s ability (or sense) to stay alive who has more than one Sup rune set.

Spirit keepers should know their business... everyone else needs to bring interrupts.

A bigger problem with BP in Tombs now is the lack of understanding and implementation of choke point strategy.... but that's a topic for another thread.


Dawn

as far as barrage / pet rangers go, the best attributes ive found come from using an expertise mask with a sup marks rune in it. then having a minor expertise, beastmastery, and wilderness rune and of course a sup vigor.

my attributes for pve on my ranger are always 15 marks, 13 expertise, 7 wilderness, rest into beast (like 3 i think). I run this bar:
troll unguent, Barrage, savage shot, distracting shot, throw dirt (can be replaced with cap sig for missions etc...), comfort animal, charm animal, rebirth or res sig... Using a req 10 15>50 zealous recurve of fort (+30)

this gives me enough high dmg output with my bows and barrage, i have hit the expertise breakpoint, have a +6 troll, enought to res my pet, and zealous+barrage = win

thats been the best ive found personally.

I usually have a marks mask with a minor marks rune on it. When I do Tombs, I switch to a spare mask I got from the trader at Amnoon with a sup marks on it. Before I did that, I didn't have any trouble finding a group. Often a group will look for any BP's, then figure out who brings what spirits. Usually I let someone else bring the spirits if they want. I'm okay with bringing them but sometimes I may forget to activate it and it kinda puts me on the spot. Pulling does that too, but I've gotten better at it and remembering where the pop ups are.

When I did have a level 9 FW, I don't recall getting flamed for it though.

Man, most people I know who run a B/P get another pet once theirs reaches level 20. This way they die quicker.

And I never put points in beast cause I want them to die ( and so do the mm's )

Also almost everything in Tombs will kill you quick, just imagine how much damage the minions are taking. MM's are constantly making minions, even if they are at 10, they keep doing it just to recylce the squad.

Personally I can live without FW in there, since Barrage is still recharging well after my arrows already hit ( and I hang way in back cause I'm a wuss ) but alas it really doesn't matter what level FW is at since 2 hits and its dead anyways. Its all about placement.

I think one thing I hate the most about doing Tombs is running into a monk who heals your pets and ignores the Order Necro.

Then the mm leaves cause he ain't got any bodies to animate. Good times!!