If the other team can afford killing you without suffering from any drawback, it means that you've probably overextended too much or that your team isn't pushing enough. AoM may help in this situation (AoM3 is like what, 15% effective HP?) but it's better to avoid this situation in the first place. IP is different as it allows you to purposely overextend, I can agree on that.

But outside of this situation, you dying isn't that much of a problem. If they attack you because you're the closest target then it's actually a pretty good thing for your team. Think about it, the only reason why Skald is grouped is because of the speed (even a Thane would be much better in the role of the free electron), killing it first makes absolutely no sense.

This is correct.

All a kite grp wants is to thin out their enemys by kite and cc. So they reduce the ammount of ppl that can interrupt their cast assist.

A good Skald can interrupt 2-3 ppl at the same time, which is a nightmare for any Support and caster. So if they cant cc you, they will kill you. Both aom and IP let you survive that easyier.

So imagine this scenario: your mid pushgrp pushes into an Alb caster grp. The Skald is ignored at the start because there is a lot of Pressure comming from the berserks. The zerks get snared off by the arms one by one, healers are getting rooted and there remains only the Skald in midst the Alb grp. Not so unlikeley right?

There the Alb casters See their Moment to start killing. The arms slams the Skald and The casters start debuff nuking. No purge because the Skald purged a root before. Here aom shines. It lets you survive those critical seconds. Then the stun wears off and you can use ip. Other wise you would need an insta from one of your healers.

At this Moment Most of your zerks are free again and close up to their targets. The alb casters have Used about 30% of their mana bar on nothing. Their Position is awfull and nothing was achieved.

Its all about buying the time for your Team to close the gap to the casters again. And it is very likely that this Situation will happen.

I prefer Avoid Pain over Ignore pain, 15m timer instead of 30, 60s god mode.. but that's personal preference I suppose.

Take both!

Im thinking about fury of the gods. For sure it isnt strong like new frontrier anger of gods but since skalds dont have any group RAs. No sos. No group purge.
It could help and give group a little dps push. That should be more than mop can give me with a bit higher critchance. Isnt it?

I found FotG to be difficult to use optimally, 30 seconds is pretty short and it has a range of 1500 if I remember correctly. Sometimes it's very strong, sometimes it's close to useless. For a 30mn RA that's pretty harsh.
I would still take it over AoM / IP for group play though, but that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion.

Kaziera wrote:So imagine this scenario: your mid pushgrp pushes into an Alb caster grp. The Skald is ignored at the start because there is a lot of Pressure comming from the berserks. The zerks get snared off by the arms one by one, healers are getting rooted and there remains only the Skald in midst the Alb grp. Not so unlikeley right?

There the Alb casters See their Moment to start killing. The arms slams the Skald and The casters start debuff nuking. No purge because the Skald purged a root before. Here aom shines. It lets you survive those critical seconds. Then the stun wears off and you can use ip. Other wise you would need an insta from one of your healers.

At this Moment Most of your zerks are free again and close up to their targets. The alb casters have Used about 30% of their mana bar on nothing. Their Position is awfull and nothing was achieved.

Its all about buying the time for your Team to close the gap to the casters again. And it is very likely that this Situation will happen.

Just want to reiterate on this, because it is shows both what the Skald's job is and how Skald is perceived by (good) enemy groups. The described scenario sets in against groups with 3 or more casters, and those are 70% of Hib/Alb groups at the moment.
Some groups like Prime don't even need the Slam to 4-shot you with three casters debuff-nuking you within 3-4 seconds. And you know why you don't get heals? Because their AoM4 Minstrel rupts your whole backline, just like a Skald should.

bm01 wrote:I would still take it over AoM / IP for group play though, but that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion.

I don't know if you're playing Skald on this server, because if you really tried out FotG and still say it's better than AoM or IP for group play then I really don't know what to say anymore. FotG is, for 10 points, a total waste of an RA at this patch level. I'd even rate AugCon3 higher (which is about 60HP, so 3-4% more HP); I think that says enough about FotG.

Never said FotG was good, but between that and what is for me selfish RAs, the choice is easy to make. Increasing your HP pool over your damage potential is bad for most classes (even if you aren't in the melee train), same way 10 Con at character creation is suboptimal and points on AugCon are wasted (at least alternate with Toughness). We're talking about being able to take one more DD at best before dying here, how often does that make a difference? From my experience, pretty rarely.

bm01 wrote:Never said FotG was good, but between that and complete selfish RAs (yes I know, they can help you in some crazy situations that should just never happen), the choice is easy to make.

How is getting nuked a CRAZY situation? Did you play any RvR on this server yet? Is this real life, hello?

How is picking an RA that directly serves the purpose of playing your role in the GROUP selfish?! Skalds enable your group's backline to do their job.

Oh well, looks like you're the big numbers guy that loves to get into the assist train. Nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong (actually it's so wrong in so many situation, but that's just my personal opinion).
But I'm the guy that wants to get rupts in as much as possible without overextending so my backline can support my offtanks which do enough damage on their own because, well, MIDGARD.

Not saying that the first approach doesn't work in general, but I can say that decent groups don't want you in group for executing that approach.

Do you know some exact numbers about fotg ?
This would help me us a lot more then any personal opinions.

bm01 wrote:
Never said FotG was good, but between that and complete selfish RAs (yes I know, they can help you in some crazy situations that should just never happen), the choice is easy to make.

It's exactly my idea.

Ibero wrote:Do you know some exact numbers about fotg ?
This would help me us a lot more then any personal opinions.

bm01 wrote:
Never said FotG was good, but between that and complete selfish RAs (yes I know, they can help you in some crazy situations that should just never happen), the choice is easy to make.

It's exactly my idea.

20-30 damage a hit as a sc-ed Skald with a 2H on a target with maxed melee resists.

tharid wrote:20-30 damage a hit as a sc-ed Skald with a 2H on a target with maxed melee resists.

That's roughly what it did on a Savage on Live, it should be higher on a Skald unless Uthgard is different.
I don't remember the exact DPS it added and I can't find any information on it unfortunately.

I'm not disagreeing with aom as a choice for group play, but isn't aom a secondary resist? Therefor the value shown on the ra, isn't actually value that relates to damage taken from casted damage.

Sifi wrote:I'm not disagreeing with aom as a choice for group play, but isn't aom a secondary resist? Therefor the value shown on the ra, isn't actually value that relates to damage taken from casted damage.

If I remember correctly, there has been a patch that changed how resists from RA worked.

At first they were additive with everything else, then they became multiplicative. I don't remember if it was before or after 1.65.

Basically let's say you have 26% from items, 16% from buff, 9% from AoM3. If it's additive, that's 51% total (AoM3 adding 9%). If it's multiplicative, that's 47% (AoM3 adding 5%).

Edit: Looks like it's since 1.65: "Spell resists from realm abilities are now displayed and applied separately to the character, which should reduce some of the extreme cases of very high resistances." There's also the /bonuses window showing two resist values for each type.

I think this was some time after 1.65. At the moment AoM is additive, so a flat 3/6/9/12/15% will be added to all Magic resists.