Maximising oathbreakers

As you all hopefully know, oathbreaker's shame is an awesome skill that captains have which can be used to increase all incoming melee, ranged and tactical damage on a single target by 35% for 10 seconds. It has a 5min cooldown. With two captains regularly slotting into our raid group, we can combine oathbreakers to get a combined 20s of very hard hitting on a boss to quickly get through a particularly nasty phase or just to finish him off when we're all starting to run out of steam at the end of a fight. This is a time for the tank to burn his threat cooldowns and everyone else to go ioto top gear on their damage.

In the interest of educating us raid leaders and getting us all thinking about how to maximise our DPS during this time, can people post their long cooldown skills that they might want to save up for this phase or anything else that their class can use to help maximise DPS during a short window which might not be used all the time in their normal rotation. I'll kick things off with the ones I know.

Captains

To Arms - 10s buff (20s legacied) on 1min cooldown which increases the shield brothers' damage by 25% and the whole fellowship's damage by 10% if the leader of men capstone is slotted (this on its own is a pretty good reason to slot leader of men).

Champions

Battle fervour - Adds fervour pips on 1min cooldown.

Continuous blood rage - +10-20% damage at the cost of a morale drain and massively reduced incoming healing modifier. Use carefully!

Fight on - +25% melee damage for 30s with a power penalty on expiration. Can only be used if you're underneath 60% morale... if you really need to get there, use blood rage!

Hunters

Burn Hot - 20% damage boost for 20s every 5m (40% every 2min if cool burn is traited).

Minstrels

Ballad of war - T3 ballad that increases melee damage by +10% (+20% with the appropriate legacy). Definitely try to tier this up as we get to an oathbreakers/damage race phase.
Call to greatness - Throw it on a champion (defeat response and +fervour) or a burg (+15% positional damage - HUGE - and quicker surprise strike recovery) for a big damage boost.

Lore-masters

Lightning storm - high damage skill with long induction on 5min cooldown
Ancient craft - armour debuff, 1m cooldown, either 30s or 1m duration depending on traits
Bear armour rend - +10% incoming melee/ranged damage for 30s on 1min cooldown
Ents go to war - Reasonably high damage skill on either 5min or 2min cooldown depending on traits

Rune-keepers

Epic conclusion - thanks to the power cost debuff you obviously don't want to be using this much during a fight, but it's perfectly ok to throw it down towards the end of a fight when oathies is up. 1m 30s cooldown.

Re: minstrels: since the patch using 3 of the ballads increase melee/tactical/ranged damage by 5% respectively (melee gets a 15% boost) so if a minny ballads up just before oathbreakers, everyone should have damage buffs on for the entire duration of oathbreakers especially if the minny is specced for buffing.

If we only have a single target, then you have pretty much already covered it for Champs (assuming one is running in fervour).

About the only other thing we have is dirty fighting, which gives us a bonus to aoe damage for a short bit. But that's not really a CD type skill, since it's always up, but can't be used unless the target is below 20% health (without having a trait for 50% threshold). But again, not much use if there's nothing else to hit that's fairly weak.

Other then that, I'm a Champ, so always doing max damage, unless there's a reason to hold back (waiting for a tank to get aggro, making sure I have clobber up all the time, ready to use).

Hunters: Burn Hot is obviously the BIG cooldown skill in an 'Oathbreakers'-type phase (a.k.a when I need to drop as much DPS as possible), but there is one other cooldown skill that I like to use and recommend as a 'prelude' of sorts to this: Press Onward. Press Onward is a Legendary skill that restores a large chunk of both morale and power (scaled with level), with a 5-sec induction. It's not the morale heal I'm interested in regarding this move, it's the POWER heal.

The thing is, hunters are almost always hurting for power, even if we use pots. This is doubly true in a long battle. And I can tell you this from experience: there is NOTHING worse than being out of power when you have a boss at low or critical morale. And if your power is low to begin with before you use Burn Hot, in all likelihood popping Burn Hot will use up almost all the power you have left (it costs around 630 power or so for me). Which in turn leads to that most frustrating and nightmarish of situations: having my ultimate desperation buff active and wasting away without me being able to take any advantage of it due to power issues. My remedy to that problem? Preparing with a Press Onward AND a pot BEFORE I hit Burn Hot.

Vasilion

I agree that to arms lends a huge bonus fellowship damage, but Lom isn't a popular traitline on this server.

9/10 people that ask my cappy to group with them, are looking for healing and incombat rez. Ie, blue traitline, so thats what i usually run. Hence why my LI's and gear is all that way.

Going 5 yellow for the lom capstone, would increase dmg from to arms. Increase dmg from blade of elendil. But it will severaly cripple the off heals I've been providing. Lom lets you do party heals in addition to the rallying cry, but they're much smaller heals.

Depends what you think we can handle really. It'll be a lot more pressure on the healers.

@Vasilion - great tip.

@Nasda - yeah, I have noticed that. From everything I read though, while HoH was far and away the preferred captain raiding traitline, nowdays leader of men is preferred for the group wide shield brother benefits (which do include some healing through inspire - which will be stacking with iirc the muster courage HoT in update 3). I realise it's a lower total heal output but I think it's worth experimenting with, especially in fights which prioritise DPS like OD wound wing and SS T2 osan fight.

also for champs- while an oathbreaker is going it's usually a good time to hit continuous blood rage (need to be traited 5 red to slot it). i personally only use it for the last scramble to finish raid bosses off, it's a risky stance that can/will get you killed if overused since it drops incoming healing to pretty much nothing (healers hate it when you go in it too) along with draining 60 morale every second it's active. apart from that (traited) flurry should be going at all times- though if you hit controlled burn early on in a fight you'll have ardent flurry/glorious exchange and red haze (if you have the trait slotted) for the whole fight anyway. don't forget the trait for rend either- even with the weapon legacy the armour debuff it gives isn't huge but every little bit helps for doing more damage.

Great tip cira, added it to the above. Obviously situational and ppl won't always have it traited, but if it's there as an option then this is the time to use it.

Anyone else got some class specific tips?

ummm, so why did no one tell me that Fight On gives +25% melee damage for 30s? That's perfect! needing to have < 60% morale kinda sucks but that's not going to be too uncommon near the end of boss fights and if you really need to get there, pop on (continuous) blood rage for a bit!

Also I totally didn't realise that To Arms had a legacy that could increase its duration to 20s.... that's AWESOME! I want one.

Psychobabble wrote:ummm, so why did no one tell me that Fight On gives +25% melee damage for 30s? That's perfect! needing to have < 60% morale kinda sucks but that's not going to be too uncommon near the end of boss fights and if you really need to get there, pop on (continuous) blood rage for a bit!

don't think anyone really slots it. if you time it wrong, say goodbye to any kind of power regen for the rest of the fight. plus there's only the 3 slots to use- raging blades is pretty much a necessity, so if you're slotting that and cbr then there's one left to play with and controlled burn tends to be a better/more useful option. that said, fight on can definately be useful if timed right, though it's ridiculously situational.

yeah I can definitely see that it's situational bc of the power drain and morale gate, I can think of at least two spots in OD (Ivar final phase which is a huge DPS race and disease T2 near the end if you're going for the challenge) where it could be really useful to the point where I think i'll ask the champs to slot it for those spots. It's a pretty significant bump in DPS. Everyone's going to be basically under 60% morale at some point in the final phase of Ivar so it should be easy to proc there, and hopefully the same can be engineered in the disease fight. Basically any time you're nearing the end of a boss fight and they're doing the crazy things bosses usually do before they die I could see it being a good idea.