Utility of marches inside Abyssea?Follow

I'll admit it, I don't have a melee, so this is coming out of left field. But...

Anyone else starting to question the accepted wisdom of marches being our top buff inside Abyssea? With all the counter and retaliation that MNK an WAR tanks do, all the OAT-OA3 the DDs pack on, and frankly how often I see the DDs at 160+ TP because they aren't riding their TP and thus not getting the most out of their marches, I really wonder if an Attack song wouldn't do more, especially on higher defense bosses in Heroes zones.

If you have 2 melee in your party with max gear haste who are receiving the spell 'haste', then double marches will add more damage than adding a 3rd DD or any other song combination.

Actually, rocking 40% haste from gear + spell, the 25% haste marches now give will nearly double the damage of that melee (not counting couter/retal/etc). There is certainly no attack buff that is going to double your damage. And to think that the animation for march 3 was in this last update....

The importance of attack songs is actually shrinking as the static attack given my minuet is getting smaller in comparison to the defense and attack values of mobs and PCs.

Yup, marches are still king.

Pretty much the only time I won't give marches is if I'm fighting an Abyssea NM and we're trying to proc grellow. In that case, everyone gets mambos instead until we get the all clear to kill.

In the most common TP set ups ninja does not cap total delay without songs. With af3 head, af1 body, and suppa even with full gear and spell haste they are not capped. They get full benefit from march2 and only need to change one piece of DW gear out when receiving both songs. Generally they will use af3 body in these cases. And even in that case marchx2 will give more damage than march/min even though they aren't reaping the full benefit of the second march.

Thief gets even fewer DW traits. They aren't capping without march.

Dancer can, but then again they are never used now in voidwatch or abyssea (unless solo then no need to discuss it).


March is just infinitely better.



Edit: put more plainly, with 50% DW (35 traits/suppa/af body/af3 head) you can still use 60% haste without hitting the cap. 25 from gear. 15 from spell. 15 from march 2. That still leaves you 5 to benefit from with march 1 and that will give you more damage than minuet because of the increasing awesomeness of haste at high levels. With those buffs active take off af1 body and put on af3 or juogi, but don't change songs.

Edited, Aug 30th 2011 7:44pm by BarberofSeville