26k is honestly not a bad start. The learning curve is very steep with the rotation on NB. I would venture to say that mid to high 30's is very doable with your setup. The best of the best nightblades are pushing 50k totally self buffed on a 6 million health target dummy with BIS gear, and with a little help and a few tricks, they are getting well into the 50s. VMA staff would def help, and I might slide a few points out of staff expert into erosion, but that is a judgement call and depends a bit on your group.

You are on PC, so I really suggest downloading combat metrics if you havent. I am also a fan of Srendarr and Grim Focus Counter on NB. You need to really restrict srendarr quit a bit in the settings, but its better than ADR for a dynamic rotation.

There are really Three parts to the mageblade rotation.

The first is how you manage your spectral bow. I think it's a good idea to keep track of your light attacks per second, as its a good benchmark on how tight your weave is. Your realistic goal should be about 0.9, meaning that if your fight is 100 Seconds, you should get about 90 light attacks. That will likely fall a bit in real fights, but on a dummy it is very doable. Another benchmark is the number of Spectral Bows you fire. I would say about 1/6 seconds is pretty strong. So on a 90 second fight, I would expect to see around 15. Your bow proc is always your priority and if doing it right you should have a bow proc every 5th attack. You light attack 4 skills, and you actually weave the bow proc on your 5th. This def takes practice, and a LOT of bar swapping. Also do your best to swap cancel a skill every time your bar swap. A good weave and a good bar swap cancel is more important to nightblade than any other class.

The second part is managing your DOTs/buffs. You really have 4 to consider in actual combat, but 5 on a dummy. The order of importance for you damage skills is Elemental Blockade, Twisting Path, Cripple. These all have different effective durations. EB and Cripple look the same, but cripple has a travel time if you are at range. You also have to keep up Siphoning. This is a lower priority than the damage skills, but you still want to shoot for a high up-time. You want to let this run out completely before you recast to maximize your magic return. On a 3 million dummy, you can honestly cast it pre-fight and forget about it, on a 6 mill you probably need to cast it 3 times total, 4 if you are a little lower on the DPS scale. Lastly is elemental drain, only an issue on self buffed parses, but if you want a good parse, these needs to be up 100%, both for the damage and the sustain.

What separates the good from the great nightblades is that the good nightblades run a fixed/circular rotation, and the great nightblades run a dynamic rotation. That means they simply cast DOTs as they come up. There is no order to it. A circular rotation involves always casting them in order, which is a clear DPS loss. I think a solid middle ground is to manage EB and cripple together, and twisting path separately, but the goal is to juggle them all independently. This just takes a lot of practice. I like Srendarr for this because you can whitelist only your skills and they will appear in the order they are set to expire.

The third part is managing your execute. On a dummy, most people drop Twisting/refreshing Path and Cripple, but there are good reasons to potentially keep one or both up in an actual fight. Make sure you still fire your bow when it procs, and keep Relentless and Blockade up. Once at 25, impale becomes your spam.

I will plug LZH's addon setup vid. I setup my srendarr exactly like his. His page is worth exploring if you want to see what a nightblade is really capable of doing. Keep at it. It takes a while, but once you get it, you wont play anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjaGXJoEeFE

Agenericname wrote: »

@Oreyn_Bearclaw That video is an eye-opener. I do use Combat Metrix. I'm hesitant to use my parse from last night as a real measurement simply because the lag was some of the worst that I've experienced so far. I'll run it again and hopefully get a better picture. Last night's was slightly over 24k on a 6M dummy and the bow fired 26 times. That's just shy of 10s.

My light weaving is also not nearly that fluid. If mid 30s is possible then it appears that the lack of a good rotation is holding back a fairly substantial amount of DPS.

Thanks for the info, I'll keep practicing.

Yeah, his page is an eye-opener, and that’s an understatement.

I am no slouch in this game and can hit mid 40s on 6 mil consistently on my NB, but I am simply not playing the same game as LZH, which is true of most of us. He has a build vid with a full parse and some VMA runs that are mind blowing that you should also check out. At one point (prob still does) he had the world record on every class.

If you have any questions about srendarr, I can try to help. The short(ish) version is as follows.

First, go the main buff page in the settings and simply turn everything off (do not display or something like that).

Second, unlock the buff trackers and position tracker 1 and 4 on either side of the cursor. You will have to go into the settings to flip number 4 around, but it’s pretty obvious. Make sure both are sorted by remaining duration so that the one about to expire is on top. You can adjust the size as you see fit. I make mine a bit bigger than default.

Third, go into the whitelist section. You have to manually type the name of the skill in and press enter, then it will save it. This takes a little messing with to get used to it, but the fairly straightforward. Things like merciless and siphoning are considered buffs, and I set them in column 4 (right side). Things like dots or major beach are considered debuffs, and I keep them in column one on the left. You can just set ground dots in the general tab to column one, but I prefer to list them individually. The skill name should always do the trick in terms of whitelisting, but you can also use he buff name (for example minor force instead of channeled acceleration). It’s worth getting this working on any character where you aren’t following a circular rotation.

I also set it up the same way on my Sorc for PVP. My shield stack is on the right side and my long buffs (surge, boundless, mutagen) are on the left. Makes it much easier to keep your eyes on the cursor instead of the bottom of the screen.

I was coming off of playing mostly mag Sorc in trials. When I switched to mageblade, it took a solid two weeks of practice to get to the point that I was actually pulling head of my Sorc. Once you get it, you realize it’s way more fun and superior in almost every way except of course, ease of rotation.