About BoneDancers

[Fin / Valar]

Hi all, I'd like to share some thoughts on BDs here on Eden!
I've just reached lvl 50 on my BD and the first thing that came out is that Bone Army is the way to go for leveling up. Darkness is not good enough, until you get the 50% body debuff and last caster pets, while Bone Army lets you go with dots, melee buffs for pets and good heals.

Suppression is a bit the underdog of the lines, for what I have seen so far. The healers pet are just nice, not something memorable, and the fact that they will heal up to 75% and no more is quite annoying for leveling up/farming. Plus the 8 secs recast delay on LifeTap makes an high supp build a kind of a waste, it doesn't matter that you have a good baseline DD and an (awful) AOE spec with snare. Good for BGs maybe, nothing more. Anyway I think I'll eventually try a supp build to see how it fits, but from what I see on the charplan, and my experience with BDs, it does not seem the FoTM build right now.

Now I'm trying a somehow weird build: 46 Dark 28 BoneArmy (probably will become a 48/24) with no Supp, no healer pets, only 2 Warmages and 1 BoneHexers for PvP, 3 Warmages for PvE. I completely avoid the "healing" part of the BD and focus only on the single target damage and interrupt if needed. Maybe the best for RvR would be 50 dark with the nice last spec DD+snare but for farming/pve it's somehow wasted and a little more BoneArmy is better.

What do you think about BDs here? What's your favourite build/playstyle?

[Malidry]

I always preferred 40 darkness 36 suppression for RvR. Darkness line gives you the two debuffing caster pets. 40 darkness also gives you high enough darkness to keep you from having bad variance dmg on your DDs and the 36 suppression gives you the lifetap high enough to do some dmg/interupt and not have it get resisted often. It also helps give you a little bit of burst damage if you land the lifetap and a DD at the same time. If you go 36 suppression you can use the baseline DD without variance if you prefer spirit damage instead of cold. Suppression also gives you the group ablative buff if you run in groups for RvR. That is just my opinion on the BD. This of course is for a group BD, not solo. Edit: It might be 40 supp 36 darkness. Either way it doesn't change anything. If you go 40 suppression you get the casting bone commander instead of the melee bone commander.

[Fin / Valar]

I always preferred 40 darkness 36 suppression for RvR. Darkness line gives you the two debuffing caster pets. 40 darkness also gives you high enough darkness to keep you from having bad variance dmg on your DDs and the 36 suppression gives you the lifetap high enough to do some dmg/interupt and not have it get resisted often. It also helps give you a little bit of burst damage if you land the lifetap and a DD at the same time. If you go 36 suppression you can use the baseline DD without variance if you prefer spirit damage instead of cold. Suppression also gives you the group ablative buff if you run in groups for RvR. That is just my opinion on the BD. This of course is for a group BD, not solo. Edit: It might be 40 supp 36 darkness. Either way it doesn't change anything. If you go 40 suppression you get the casting bone commander instead of the melee bone commander.

Thanks for the tips, I agree on most of them. Unfortunately I think I will roll a BD on launch only for PvE, the pets behaviour in RvR and PvP is just too awful right now and it seems that noone cares about it....so I'll make a BD to have a solo toon for PvE-wasting time and something else for real RvR