Death of the beast forms

[Celerity]

What else needs nerfing? Help me out here, I'll fix all the big offenders at once and we can have a more level playing field. It feels like its about time to get it over with, doesn't it?

I mentioned this in a post I made before on the fae realm update discussion but I think epic attacks in general are over represented. It's also mentioned in the post I made above this, but during end game group elite combat, the mob dies in something like 3-6 abilities used per player depending on the group. This means to get the highest damage you simply use your highest damage abilities and not often do you worry about comboing together attacks to boost your damage further, dots or the cooldowns on your abilities, combo mods such as nice attack damage +x are good against high hp bosses and multiple elites but not individual elites, dots are only good against high hp boss mobs when in a group and the only situation where you need to worry about cooldowns is if the mob survives long enough but this is only an issue versus world bosses or the very end game bosses when you are with a weak group so it is fairly niche.

The epic attack cooldown is less important since you spend about 7-15 seconds fighting then about another 10-15 seconds waiting for the next pull to come in, since you have to loot the corpse(s) or even longer if you have to run to the next elite like in the fae realm. The low cooldown skills are already off cooldown by the time the fight ends but the long cooldown skills benefit greatly from this extra down time between fights which increases their effective dps. I think the skills where this is most apparent are archery, hammer, psychology, priest, druid and staff. Mentalism's epic is generally a bit lower damage than the others since it has the dot and the damage shield, although this would need to be addressed if the dot becomes more effective and I have not seen/played around much with giant bat, knife fighting, unarmed or warden's epics.

For soloing elites it's slightly different, the epic attacks are still important as you need to be able to output damage quickly enough to reduce the number of attacks you take from the mob but things like cc, kiting and survivalability in general become much more important, and since relatively speaking the mob has higher hp, things like dots and combo mods also become more effective. This means there really is a wide range of builds which can solo elites so it's hard to point out any such "yardsticks". Staff and archery probably shine out the most, staff since it has both very high damage plus skills giving you insane mitigation with no mods required (blocking stance and deflective spin) and archery since it has very high damage, enables you to kite and has great cc such as stun and mez.
But it's unfair to just point out those 2, spider/druid can really ramp up damage with dots when the fight lasts long enough and certainly has the survival and cc required too. Psychology is another easy one to point out, especially paired with sword since you can reduce the damage of a single target by 50% with that combo but things such as fire/ice work too due to the great number of combo mods you can get with that build and ice magic has good single target control with mez, root and random stun from frostbite. Priest, mentalism and druid all offer great damage and great healing, especially druid since you can pre-cast brambleskin and healing sanctuary and it's definitely possible to solo elites with fire/priest, archery/druid, staff/druid, hammer/mentalism builds for example.
Fire magic and hammer builds are less useful for soloing because they both increase rage much more quickly which is a big issue and you also can't kite with hammer too effectively since it is mostly melee. Despite this I'm still able to solo a phoenix in fae realm with my hammer/mentalism build, but this is mostly because I use nimble boots to evade the rage attack and evasion body + legs + belt which gives me much more survivalability against the projectiles they fire. I can also solo a basilisk in fae realm if I use an accuracy display and get lucky with no rage crits since I can slow it using seismic impact, my nimble boots let me evade its attack which normally slows you and my 2 epic attacks are usually enough damage to be able to kill it before it kills me with the rest of my abilities. If the basilisk heals from a rage crit however I normally still die.

It's honestly difficult to find builds that can't solo elites though, even things such as necromancy can provide good damage when modded correctly and I'm sure if you paired it with psychology or similar you could do it too, although I've never tried nor seen anyone do it. Maybe skills such as unarmed and shield are less effective, even if it is possible just because your kills would take so long but in general I don't think elite soloing (at the level of the elite) is ever really worthwhile or fun, I personally never do it outside of just seeing if I could. Since loot is given to everyone in a party it's just simply quicker, easier and more entertaining to party up.

But if you are fighting a "constant stream" of mobs. (Killing one/multiple, then proceeding to the next without waiting for cooldowns), then your abilites' total dps is (i think) a good indicator of how fast you are able to farm.

Depends what you mean by constant stream, let's try some quick maths and feel free to tell me if I say something stupid but this is the way I see it from my own personal build and personal experience. I have 9 main "damage" abilities on my ability bar alongside 1 basic attack, 1 heal and 1 mentalism wave. If I constantly use my abilities, it doesn't get to the point where I would have to use my basic attack, heal or wave due to cooldown availability until I have used roughly 15 abilities, since the first abilties come off cooldown when I'm using the rest. Therefore I don't think there's any situation where having lower cooldown skills with respectively lower damage per use of the ability could possiblely be of any use until I've used at least 15 abilities. Across these 15 ability uses, counting some used twice I have an average damage per ability of just over 2k but we'll round it down to 2k for ease. So assume you have a group of 6 with 1 tank, 1 healer and 4 dps players and assume both the tank and healer deal 0 damage which isn't normally the case for the tank anyway. This means assuming all the dps players are the same as me, there's a damage output of 15*2k*4 = 120k damage before cooldowns are an issue. In gk this would be equivalent to fighting roughly more than 8 elites (~15k armour + hp each) at once before cooldowns should become any real factor or 5-6 fae realm elites (~20-25k armour + hp each). This also takes no consideration for aoe attacks which would increase the number of elites you could fight at once too but taken as a very rough assumption you could say the extra effects of the tank plus aoe could roughly balance the overkill on each mob plus the fact that not every dps will be fully optimised end-game min/maxed. Now this obviously isn't true in reality since for my build power becomes an issue quicker than I can use 15 pure damage abilties, without needing to use dig deep or a basic attack and with soloing the issue would be hp, so I would have to use a basic attack to heal or specifically use my stun early outside of an optimal damage rotation just in order to survive.

Now of course if you meant a truly endless stream then you would be partially correct but I think the limiting factor in that case would be power again rather than ability cooldowns, unless you mean low level content you could use lower level versions of abilities for and this would also imply you weren't stopping to loot anything either.