Quote Originally Posted by PeWBOOMPeW View Post
Your instakills and trips are flavor. They have no bearing on "how much damage can i do to the red-named target in front of me." Also known as; DPS!

Here is an example of my DPS, so you understand I am not just making things up here.
https://streamable.com/wkqwdh

Lets break it down here. For maximum dps you need a few things.

-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality, Profane, Artifact, Exceptional of your damage stat.
-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality, Profane deadly (profane often being relegated to Llolth cookies)
-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality deception, Artifact Sneak Dice
-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality seeker
-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality accuracy
-Enhancement, Insightful, Artifact Armor Piercing
-Enhancement, Insightful, Quality, Artifact Doublestrike (Quality being excluded if you can cap doublestrike without it of course.)
-Artifact Melee power (hello potf!)
Often we find insightful deadly and accuracy through a trance ability; that becomes a different discussion of maximizing your secondary stat for Divine Might, KTA, Deadly Instincts, etc. But thats neither here nor there.

Stunning, trip, con, sheltering; none of these effects affect your raw damage; therefore, they have no bearing on DPS.

I won't go into sentient slotting, because that doesn't necessarily fit into this conversation.

So, you design your perfect gear set that includes all of the above; where else can you get more damage? Melee power. Where are the only sources of natural melee power (read:non-mythic/reaper) on gear in the game? Crown of Butterflies, Ring of Prowess, and Titania's glory.
These items are mandatory; they are not replaceable by any other item. Lots of items have all the other stats i listed above! No other item has the melee power provided by Crown of Butterflies. Therefore if you are serious about maximizing how hard can I smack this boss standing in front of me your gearset must include these items.
You have a good point about how those items are mandatory if you want top tier dps for high reaper raids. I think you forgot though that 0.05% of players are doing high reaper raids. Bosses in R10 quests have a lot less HPs and taking them down do not require top tier dps. Of course I know you know that. I just wanted to highlight that you are right in that they are mandatory if you aim for absolute dps but they are not mandatory for most players who prefer questing. It all depends on what you like about the game. Also you should be careful when posting vids because some might look up to you for dps but you gotta explain that your guild specialize in high R raids and you build and gear for max debuffing too. Explaining your numbers and showing/naming debuffs and their effects is important for everyone to understand/know what can be done to 'boost' dps like you guys are doing so well. Some might also laugh at you for having such low dps on a fully debuffed boss on R7 you know. Of course I have no way to know if its fully debuffed since you are only flaunting your ego with numbers in this post/vid. Again I agree those items are mandatory when aiming for max dps for high reaper raiding. You are correct.