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Artifact Blackjack
So I was looking at Jester and I think I would really enjoy it for hunting and combat eventually. I was wondering if there is a strong jester out there that could lend me their artifact blackjack or any other artifacts they want whenever I go hunting til I am able to afford my own artifacts?
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Ohh I suppose I should delete this thread then. Thank you for the information!
I enjoyed being a Jester. Tesha's right on the other artefacts beyond the blackjack though. A shield of absorption would not go amiss either.
60/200/200 damage/to-hit/speed
haha of course you would know sena shoulda just asked you from the start. as for the artifacts I was just looking those up and unless I get a very rich benefactor or rob a bank i don't think getting those are feasible sadly.
Artied jester hunting to me is the best in game. Tanky with SoA and slipperiness, con/sip ring etc - jester with level 3 blackjack, sip ring, pendant, soa and con arties to me is the tankiest bashing class, and I have been well.. all of them fully artied.
I think artied jester bashing is just insane.
and you will never run out of endurance ever.
with the nerf to bop damage, there is only a marginal increase in damage done from non Artie blackjack to level 3. You will find your bops are faster, but that's it. As it stands, level 3 is useless.
There's only a slight difference in damage between stock and artefact blackjacks (just like before the bashing changes), but that doesn't mean artefact blackjacks are useless; artefact blackjacks for bashing are actually pretty overpowered at the moment (though not as overpowered as priests/bards/knights).
Also, going from a stock blackjack to level 1 (300 credits) increases your DPS by about 20%, which is the same benefit as a level 3 collar (1600 credits) for magic-using classes. The only class that gets more benefit (in terms of bashing offense) from an artefact is priest.
10% damage + 10% speed = a significant boost in bashing speed
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
And, again, the bashing changes didn't make artefact blackjacks less useful. The only thing that changed for jesters, aside from damage being reduced by 6% across the board at trans, is that they're even better than before compared to other classes. Artefact blackjacks were awesome before the bashing changes, and they're exactly the same now.
It seems like it takes far too long to kill anything of value even with my Level 3 Blackjack and other arties. Likewise, the speed barely seems legit for the expense when I take into account the much faster bashing is on my other characters, not to mention the slight increase in speed lost since I can no longer rune the thing.
Statistically it may be still a great artefact, but personal perception is often enjoyment, and I don't get a lot of joy when hunting as a jester anymore.
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
If you're comparing it to artied priest/knight/bard (and maybe serpent) bashing then I could see that, but that's because those classes are all as overpowered as artied jesters are. Monk, shaman, druid, sylvan, sentinel, occultist, apostate, alchemist, magi, blademaster, and even dragon (all fully artied) are all dwarfed by jester when it comes to offense.
Just looking at the benefit you get from the blackjack compared to other classes' offensive artefacts (not comparing the classes themselves), a L1 blackjack (300 credits) is approximately equal to a L3 collar or knuckles (1600 credits) or a diadem (850 credits). No other artefact comes close to the benefit of a L3 blackjack (1000 credits, roughly a 47% DPS boost compared to a normal blackjack; better than a L3 collar and diadem combined) except a L3 mace for priests (which makes a bit more of a difference, but is also more expensive).
I'll agree with @Sena in that hunting as my Jester (Lvl 3 BJ) is now easier than in Dragonform. (My perception, no figures to back that up.) Mainly because of the speed and supporting elements like Priestess / Magician etc. The benefit in DF is the extra health and resistances, of course.
But then, I used to bash in Jester before the changes anyway unless I wanted the easy route through Istarion while on the hunt for Elder Talisman pieces.
2: Then you're simply wrong. Artied jester DPS completely crushes artied alchemist, artied apostate, artied blademaster, artied druid, artied magi, artied monk, artied occultist, artied sentinel, artied shaman, and artied sylvan, and artied dragon. There's no room for interpretation there, jester damage and speed is far better than any of those 11 classes, if you have a level 2 or 3 blackjack.
3: The classes with a higher damage output than artied jester are bard (with a level 3 rapier they have the same DPS as jesters, but they can get forged weapons that are much better), runewarden, infernal (only with very high-end rapiers, the kind that will cost you 100-200 credits), paladin (same as infernal, though inspiration helps a bit), artied priest, and artied serpent (only slightly better than jester). Those 6 classes (including jester) are all overpowered when it comes to bashing. Jester might be the least overpowered of those 6 classes; but at the same time, blackjacks are a lot cheaper than the arties for those other classes (except priest, maces are only slightly more expensive than blackjacks), so they don't have to spend as much to be overpowered.
4: Offensively, monk is the second worst bashing class. They have other things to make up for their lack of offence, so they're not that bad overall, but they're far from the best.
Edit: In response to your first line, the thing that started this discussion was Talysin saying that artefact blackjacks are useless, and Bluef agreeing. Your first point has been my main argument here, that artefact blackjacks make a huge difference.
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
First, I don't think monk is one of the worst bashing classes. I'd argue it's one of the best. It's base dps might be a low, but monks hit three times per combo, therefore getting three chances of critical hits. The chance of getting critical hits raises at higher levels and stacks with a crit pendant, human crit bonus, and crit bonus traits making monk a crit monster. This isn't even considering if the monk is str specced or owning str arties or knuckles. All of that coupled with that nice defense you mentioned. So, an artied monk should be destroying Jester in terms of bashing.
Second I think your bard vs jester analysis is off. lvl3 rapiers have the same speed stat as a lvl3 blackjack with a higher damage stat, so if a jester and bard have the same stats and each a level3 weapon the bard should be doing more damage. Not to mention that bard also has a tuning that additionally damages, and which counts as a separate attack towards critical hits. The only thing in that sentence that I will agree with is the bit about getting even better forged weapons, but it'll be a while before that becomes a more expensive route than a lvl3 blackjack. I believe forged weapons last over 250 days? that's over half a year. So even if you buy them at 200cr a piece as bard, it'll be like 2 and a half years before you hit the 1000cr marker... 5 if you store it in a stasis container.
I just don't think you factored everything in or how you reached this conclusion if you did. Especially with spec builds. Most of the classes you've mentioned have a common spec build that allows their damage to scale higher for both pvp and pve, for example a str specced runewarden or str specced monk. Jester on the flipside is not a physical damage class for pvp, yet is for pve. So, the most common builds for jester are likely to be dex or con based in order to survive better. So, not much str to scale with unless you're the odd one out that went high str.
Anyways, that's what I mean by sucky bashing... this overall experience when everything comes together. Also, I used to play a serpent for a while before Kaie got arties. I found the experiences to be pretty similar, with the exception that I can get different stats on a whip for garrote. This is before they buffed garrote mind you.
[spoiler]Monk, blademaster, and shaman are definitely the bottom 3, but blademaster and shaman have unique reasons for that, blademaster requiring a frequently suicidal stance to reach normal DPS and shaman requiring a long period of uninterrupted attacking to take full advantage of swiftcurse in order to reach normal DPS, while monk is always below normal with no way to catch up even situationally, but they're better than non-arash blademaster or shaman without swiftcurse. So monk could be anywhere from the worst to the third worst, depending on how you look at it (personally, I would put blademaster as the worst, then monk, then shaman).[/spoiler]
As for the crit rate: Like Bukariin said, three times the crits (compared to a class that has one attack for the same balance as a combo) doesn't mean three times the damage. It does mean that the crits are spread out more, and smaller, more frequent crits mean less wasted damage, so it's definitely an advantage, but it's not a huge enough difference to give monk above average offence.
The speed stat isn't the same, L3 rapiers have 228 and L3 blackjacks have 240, unless I'm missing something. Even ignoring that though, bop has an entirely different damage formula than jabbing with a songblessed rapier (songblessed rapiers are also different than normal rapiers, and each weapon type has its own damage formula), so you can't really compare them by just looking at the damage stat. Jester damage (before strength) is 282+2.82*DamageStat, while bard damage (before strength) is 144+3.2*DamageStat for the jab, then accentato is simply 25% of the damage jab did, for a total of about 180+4*DamageStat. Both use the same speed formula. So bard DPS with a L3 rapier at 12 str without nimble is about 221.31, and jester DPS with a L3 blackjack at 12 str without nimble is about 220.47.
You're right about the costs though, bards only need one rapier and it doesn't have to be a 200 credit rapier, so bard is cheaper than jester unless they want a soulpiercer.
That's a good point. But even without str spec, they're just brought down to normal (artied jester without str spec is about the same DPS as most other artied classes), they're not actually bad. Still better than str specced artied monk (again, just comparing offence alone).
When you compare the full class instead of just offence, it becomes a lot more complicated and subjective, so I wouldn't definitively claim that jester is one of the best bashing classes overall. If you strongly prefer defence and staying alive easily over killing things quickly, jester may even be one of the worst. But when you're talking about how good of a bashing attack bop is, or how much of a difference an artefact blackjack makes, or how quickly jesters can kill denizens, those are all easily quantifiable things without much room for interpretation.
That said, while I haven't specifically run the numbers for monk combos versus single attacks, I suspect that the difference isn't nearly large enough to make up for the apparent difference between artied monk and artied jester dps. I wouldn't want to make any firm claims without running some numbers, though. If I get a chance a little later, I might do that. It would be nice to have on hand, since that's very commonly cited as a major advantage to monk bashing.
@Sena's a she (at least the character is, and I don't think the player has offered any reason to assume otherwise).
Speccing for dex or con will give you 2 less str than speccing for str, which will be something like a ~10-12% difference, assuming that the strength scaling for bop is the same as for tekura. Significant, but not nearly as large as the difference in base DPS. Also, plenty of monks will also spec con, so assuming that all monks spec strength and no jesters do is not a fair comparison. It's true that extra avoidance is the only effect of dex, for jesters just like any other class, but since avoidance is a larger part of jesters' standard defense than most other classes', at least some of them do spec dex. Probably more common is to spec con. They do have at least one ability that scales with int, namely star tarot, but that's the only one I know of off the top of my head, and I doubt it's enough to get anyone to spec int.
Most importantly, none of this is worth getting angry about. As far as I can see, @Sena's not attacking anyone by pointing out that her data disagree with people's apparent experience - just trying to figure out why it seems so much worse to some people than it ought to based on the numbers. @Kaie's post seemed a little overly defensive, but also just stating his experience and arguing some justification; I certainly don't see anything to warrant straying from disagreements on the facts at hand into personal attacks. I enjoy a good nerd-debate as much as the next guy, but it's always nice to at least keep them civil.
Also, I had the speed on Soulpiercers wrong actually. I was certain I checked a few hours ago and they both had 240 speed, but I must have been staring at maces. Not sure how I got the damage from rapier and speed from mace.. that's actually kind of embarrassing but yeah.
As for the crit thing though, I understand that each of a monks hits is 1/3 of it's actual attack potential. I get that and don't disagree with him that breaking out a single x2 crit during an attack isn't as effective as me breaking a x2 crit on bop. My thought process with that was that as you increase the rate of critical hits, which could be anywhere from x2 damage to x32 damage it should begin to rack up as you gain a higher chance of kicking them out.
Anyways, now that I see where you're getting this it sounds about right with base stats. For the record though wasn't trying to say jester is bad, though after looking at the response from @Bukariin I think that's what was interpreted. I think jester is okay and artied Jester is pretty decent and the jump from lvl 1 blackjack to lvl3 is nuts, but man do stock blackjacks just feel bad. I suppose I have to admit maybe your right and the reason stock ones feel so sucky might be that I can't swap them out for ones with different stats like most every other weapon.