Expertise + Flourish

Has anyone tried this yet (I'm assuming so). For a R/Wa a high expertise should decrease the cost of any attack skill. Flourish recharges all attack skills while you have a sword equipped (sword and bow as well as others presumably). So with the average sword warrior taking seeking blade, savage slash, hundred blades, and hamstring at a total cost of 25 normally, with 40% reduction it costs 15 for all + 5 for flourish, and you get 20 for recharging them all, so you can do them all again for free immediately.

The same should be possible for a ranger if you have a sword in your F2 slot and just switch weapons quickly.

I'm sure this must have been tried already, anyone care to post experiences with it?

Matt

Yes, I have tried Flourish with a Ran/War. Expertise worked differently then but the basics remain the same. First, Flourish only works on attack skills with a recharge time. It's not going to affect your Galrath or Final or Sever or Gash so you can't use it with some of your better sword skills. Also, since those skills don't cost any energy, Expertise and energy management skills are fairly meaningless to them. Furthermore, those Warrior skills that do cost energy (the ones you mention) don't cost that much energy. We're not talking Concussion Shot here, Hamstring costs 10, most others cost 5. Expertise makes a difference but they're already pretty economic about sucking up all your energy especially because as a Ranger you'll have those 3 pips - you have to spend more than 1 energy a second to start draining your energy and with adren and Experise it's not that hard to conserve your energy and stay out of deficit spending. There's no point in trying to gain a lot of energy if you're not spending it, so Expertise makes Flourish a bit redundant unless you're spending 5 or 6 pips worth of eenrgy consistantly. Energy becomes less of a concern so what you really use Flourish for is the recharge.

But what really kills Flourish there is the casting time. I'm not sure of the most current figure but it's something like 2 seconds. It's also got a decent recharge time so to get the most out of it you'll want it to boost several skills. But look at the recharge time on those Warrior skills. They're down in the 10~15 second range and their casting time is "next attack" that means by the time you get three or four cast they'll nearly be recharged anyway and by the time you finish casting Flourish they just might be. And, even when you catch a skill you're only shaving a few seconds off the recharge time. And that's if you're using purely energy attacks, sprinkling in adrenal skills means an even longer time to get your Flourish off and more time for your quickly recharging skills to recharge. Swapping a weapon in and out, such as switching from bow to sword to cast Flourish and back, similarly adds a bit more time to everything although there it's not that badan idea because bw attacks typically have pretty long recharge times, longer than Warrior attacks, anyway.

That said, it can work, Rangers have pretty nice armor so they can make effective tanks, Expertise synergizes with Warrior attacks - not as much as with Ranger attacks but enough to make it worthwhile - as it always has, and there's certainly nothing wrong with never running out of energy. It's a nice little trick but I don't think it to be devestatingly effective, mostly because the attacks I'd really want to reuse right away are adrenal. Now, if they ever make Pure Strike or something like that energy based, we'll talk but otherwise you have to put too much on the table to run a Flourish build. I'd rather go Warrior/Elementalist for a Conjure and rely on adren. If you're not playing as a Warrior but instead playing as a Ranger Ran/War it's better, it's going to take a little practice to get it right because you'll need to learn to swap on the fly effectively, but you'll have an energy management elite that's a bit less dicey than Marksman's Wager that also supercharges your recharge...

It seemed to be a bit more effective for the Ranger but the Warrior skills were more familiar to me so I used them as an example.

As to the casting time, the info from KT is that there is no casting time, and that recharge is 10 S, so here's what that means to me, even in terms of warriors.

"Flourish ELITE (Skill) If you have a sword equipped, all of your attack skills become recharged. You gain 5 Energy for each skill recharged by Flourish. Updated: 2/18/05 5 None 10 sec. "

You attack with your 4 warrior skills and it takes 5.33 seconds? By the time you are done, you have to wait 4.66 if not 6 (does the 10s start when you click or when the action is complete?) If you use flourish immediately, you can use all those skills again at a 10 En cost if you have no expertise, if you have some, possibly free or even at an energy gain.

That increases the frequency of being able to use these attacks, as well as being able to reuse hamstring in case the first one misses (see pindown also) and if you want allows you to use a higher cost spell in between sometime because you are not waiting for your energy to recharge to use your skills.

Again, it seems more appropriate for a pure ranger to take W as a secondary for access to a no penalty recharge/energy pool with no downside than a warrior to go R/W for access to expertise to go for a larger cost ability, but it's just an idea to keep in the back of my mind as I further explore the Warrior and other classes.

Thanks Saus,

Matt

As I said, it's been a while since I used Flourish. At the time it had about a 2~3 second casting time. An instant cast makes it far more playable.

Recharge time starts when the skill is finished not when you click. That's why recycle time = casting time + recharge time. That's the amount of time it takes from finishing your skill until it finishes again and you can just multiply that for multiple casts.

The casting time of an attack skill like Savage Slash is the speed of the weapon you're using. Things like Flurry and +speed mods make it variable but it is an appreciable amount of time. Attack skills aren't instant cast (Hmm, a thought; Flourish might work similarly. It's not an attack skill but it's activation could be tied to swing speed as most other weapon-linked skills are. If you'll look at KT's list all their casting times for weapon attacks is "none" just like Flourish and for shouts like "I Will Survive!" and there is a distinct difference in just how instant those are...) so it takes some time to string them together. So, let's say you're using a standard sword, that's swings about once every 1.33 seconds so that's your casting time for Savage Slash (10 second recharge). Chain it with Hundred Blades (8 seconds) - 2.66 seconds - and Seeking (8 seconds) - 4 seconds - and Hamstring (15 seconds) by the time you've finished, you're right, that's 5.33 seconds and Savage will have 4.66 seconds left. If you start with Seeking or 100 you'll have 2.66 seconds left or enough for two more attacks. I'd rather use another few attacks at that point. I'd toss in a Sever+Gash or Galrath+Final combo and then run through the cycle again. The more attacks you chain together the less important Flourish becomes. If it's instant you don't have to worry about it costing you a swing to use it but iit's not that big a benefit considering how fast Warrior skills recharge and how free of energy management concerns adrenal skills make them.

Here's the thing, though, that's if you can get everything working perfectly. That's laboratory conditions. In reality, in the actual game, you're not going to be using your skills one after the other perfectly. You'll want to wait and use your Savage for the interrupt, you'll want to hang onto Hundred until that second enemy finishes closing, and so on. There are physical restraints on just how close to 100% efficiency you can get such as the time it takes to move a mouse, network latency, or your own reaction time. To say nothing of mistakes and errors such as hitting the wrong hotkey or trying to remember where on your bar your next skill is. Flourish gets played in the real world and the real world is going to be sloppy and inefficient. There's going to be dead, wasted seconds where your skills are recharging and you're figuring out what to do. And Flourish is defnintly affected by these.

I'm not saying that it's not good or that it's not going to work. What I'm saying is to be aware of the potential downsides. It's a nice trick and a good one to pack but there are plenty of nice tricks out there. The real question is what you can do with it, whether that trick is just a nifty little shortcut or it actually lets you do something effective, so give it a try and see if it works for you.

I first really looked into Flourish for my W/N (PvE so far).
Strength
Swordsmanship
Curses

I use MoP to disperse crowds quickly with a dual-shot ranger as a partner. I thought of using to recharge HB itself thinking that Flourish was instant. If it is, it's an additional free attack on the Hexed (making 4 in 2.66 seconds with no other speed increases) and others in sword range. In a Curses 12 situation, that's 80dmg per HB to each enemy around the Hexed, and an additional attack even at 75% to the original adds 80 + the additional damage to those I can reach. I just don't think an elite skill is worth that at this point, especially since my experience so far is that keeping enemies in a group isn't terribly easy if you only have one tank. So I will keep searching for a worthy elite in the lines of my choice.

If it comes to making a ranger to test the Flourish out with, I will post my results, again, I realize that when talking about the Warrior, the addition of adrenal skills really fill the recharge gaps, and in most cases make the energy skills the gap fillers, but as for a bow using ranger it may be very effective in a neutralizing build (concussion, pindown, etc.).

Thanks again,

Matt

Hmm. Pin down is the only bow attack (other than Oath Shot) with a longer recharge time than Flourish, and when you factor in the time to use Flourish, you're at best shaving a couple of seconds off of it. So using Flourish doesn't really speed you up much, if at all. So I guess you're looking at it for the mana? I looked at it at one point and determined, with your typical bow attack having 3-6 second recharge, and it taking just short of a couple seconds to use each, I'd never be able to catch more than two or maybe three in recharge at a time. Of course, with the right build of long recharge skills, maybe it would yield some real energy. Seems like a rather cumbersome procedure to go through just for a little mana, though. It's hard to see how this would be better than Marksman's Wager, even with the lower recharge time.

Maybe that is the case, again, I'm not terribly familiar with the Ranger skill lines. I was under the impression though that flourish was instant, as that's what KT says. True that if they have a recharge of only 6 or so you don't get much benefit, but think of it as an extra use of the skill immediately every 10 seconds, there still is something there. Pindown has a recharge of 15, and concussion shot one of 10. So for the ranger who relies on pindown to escape the attacking Warrior or whatever, it provides another chance if the first one misses. But alas, my flourish propoganda may finally have too many holes in it

Thanks for all the insight

Matt