Baleful or Seraph?: Blade Dancer Lightning

[Belletokia]

I'm an old returning player so I am having troubles figuring out which would be better in the long run.

[kultaseni]

2 hours ago, Belletokia said:

I'm an old returning player so I am having troubles figuring out which would be better in the long run.

I just came back too, but from what I know it's baleful for most classes except Warlocks and some Summoners 

[Milennin]

In the long run, it won't matter because you'll be upgrading to Dawnforge/Riftwalk, Raven etc. While Baleful is a little better early on, it'll cost you to change Dawnforge to Riftwalk (Riftwalk is better), and after that you'll either be going to Raven or continue Riftwalk to Aransu.

[Amarathiel]

I've done some extensive calculations about BD baleful and seraph and have come to conclusion seraph by far is the best after stage 6 or so when you get that 10% boost to flicker.

Let's put a hypothetical situation where you have 1000 AP and 300% crit dmg with full msp soul shield set. Main thing for bd is to keep surge goign so can do flicker+lightning flash combo. With full msp set and especially if you have magnum badge you wont have any trouble keeping surge going so resets for the most part wont give you a huge edge.

 

With stage 12 baleful the additional damage of 210% equals 2100 points of damage per stack so with 10 stacks you deal 21k more damage that cannot crit with that per reset alone. Since with full msp set you would only use the reset to quickly use the remaining core skills from your rotation that are off cooldown that are the skills in X, C and V. Those skill at max will give you only roughly 270k more crit damage per reset. So in total 1 baleful reset will give you about 300k more crit damage in total. Now that most boss fights only lasts about 30s to 2mins you wont be able to get more than 3 resets if lucky since it will take at least 30s for you to get 1 reset. Get to stack 10 then wait another 10s for the reset and so on. Realistically you would be able to get only 1 reset per boss fight if its a short fight.

 

With stage 12 seraph however you get constant boost of 10% to flicker. During a long boss fight, lets say a 6min boss fight, you will be able to do roughly 500 to 700 flickers during that time. each flicker does with 1000 AP 690 extra damage and thats non-crit damage so with crits thats 2070 points of more damage with each use. With 500 flickers its 1035000 points of extra damage during that fight, MINIMUM. You would need 4 baleful resets to be able to do nearly the same amount of damage as with seraph during the same amount of time. Unless i have miscalculated something that is.