vageta31 wrote on Feb 28
th, 2016 at 4:57pm:
Having leverage and divine artillery with no named repeaters probably makes the gap even worse.
Probably less than you think. The difference between single-shot and triple-shot volley is probably accounting for the majority of your perceived dps difference, and named vs. not-named only a very small amount.
TL;DR: It sounds like the GxB better suits your current play-style. This might change in epics, depending on how many sneak dice you can squeeze into your build and on your SA-enabling gear.The single-shot of a GxB allows faster target-switching, and fewer volleys lobbed at a dead mob. However, you aren't gaining the full benefit of sneak dice on a Pally split. In heroics, that doesn't fucking matter. Mobs are dropping in 1-2 shots, regardless.
The repeater animation was fixed, but its targeting is still left over from the old animation. If you auto-attack, you will almost always fire a full volley of three at each mob after you kill it. Even on manual, you'll still do this pretty often, until you get a feel for when a mob will/will not go down and are able to switch targets while the killing volley is still in the air. The drawback is that this affects ROF. But if the first bolt of a volley kills a mob, the other two are
subtracting from your dps.
That's always been a drawback to repeaters, but nonetheless, they smooth out the dps much better than GxBs. GxBs spike wonderfully on crits, but leave you unable position yourself with distance alone guaranteeing no mob will reach melee. Because spiky is more random. Additionally, the consequence of a 1 is full loss of dmg. With a repeater, even with a 1, you still deliver 2/3. In epics, the SA comes to shore up and smooth out the non-crit dps of the GxB, while the crits are even more wild! Meanwhile, the ROF is much closer to a repeater's, without the repeater's targeting drawback.
All combined, the GxB is the clear winner in epics. Unless you lack for sneak dice. Or unless your build takes big advantage of on-hit procs. (e.g. take a look at the GT build and why it sometimes switches out of a GxB for dispelling shot).