Un-gimping magic procs in dynamis

[Riggs]

I find these answers from the SE reps on this forum very frustrating, all he has done is re-hase the original news about this and not taken any consideration in to what people are saying about magic proc, did you even take this to any member of the dev team?
Please if you don't believe any one here go to dynamis watch how people play it, you will not see one magic proc party of solo player there.

[HimuraKenshyn]

Next up nerf WS and JA to equal magic the Old School SE way.....

[Motenten]

In one minute, I can cast 12 threnodies. 60 secs for 12 spells at 5% proc rate = 1% proc rate per sec

While I largely agree with your argument, your numbers here don't add up. Threnodies have a 2 second cast time, so with 50% spell cast time reduction it would be 1 second each. Of course you can't actually spam them 1 second apart because of the fundamental spellcasting delay, so you're still working with about 2 seconds each. Recast time is 24 seconds, though you can reduce that with haste enough that you're always going to have a threnody available (only need 33% haste to drop it under the 16 seconds a full cycle would take).

That would give you about 4 cycles (30 proc attempts) per minute. Of course you lose a fair bit of time when you have to rebuff (marches, hastes for DDs, etc) or cure -- probably 15% of all your time goes to that. That means ~26 casts, or about 3 cycles of threnodies.

The problem is what the base proc rate for magic is. If it's 5%, then even 26 attempts per minute is horrendous. Assuming 2-3 mobs per minute, that's 9-13 attempts per mob, which gives you a per-mob proc rate of 35% to 50%. If it's a 10% base proc rate, then that's 60% to 75% proc rate per mob.

The 10% rate isn't horrible, but it depends on the player being able to do almost nothing but spam spells. If I have to run for 15 seconds to the next mob, that's only one or two JA attempts lost, but it's a full cycle of spell attempts lost. Time lost to 'other stuff' (casting, running, whatever) is more detrimental to the magic user than to the JA user.


The devs apparently also don't account for the damage opportunity cost of using magic procs. If I'm using a brd, for example, I gain a lot more from letting 1 or 2 DDs focus on JA procs and fighting while the brd runs around pulling then I do by letting the brd be stuck in one spot spamming magic. It may be possible to work around that, but in every scenario I've run, you lose more by either not simply adding another DD instead of a mage, or not having the mage focus on crowd control and pulling instead of procing.

I'd say that magic procs would need to be bumped up to at least a 15% raw proc rate to be a competitive option with other proc choices.

[Yinnyth]

While I largely agree with your argument, your numbers here don't add up. Threnodies have a 2 second cast time, so with 50% spell cast time reduction it would be 1 second each.

I did not math out the fact that I could do 12 threnodies in a minute. I went outside Jeuno, stood next to a lizard, set a digital timer to 1 minute, then started spamming threnodies as fast as I could until the timer went off. I got 12.

You're under-estimating the delay after the spell casts. Just because a spell has 2 seconds casting time, and I have song cast -50% doesn't mean I can get 60 casts per minute. I can't even get 30.

[Motenten]

I did not math out the fact that I could do 12 threnodies in a minute. I went outside Jeuno, stood next to a lizard, set a digital timer to 1 minute, then started spamming threnodies as fast as I could until the timer went off. I got 12.

You're under-estimating the delay after the spell casts. Just because a spell has 2 seconds casting time, and I have song cast -50% doesn't mean I can get 60 casts per minute. I can't even get 30.

You are correct. I had assumed a 1 second next-spell-cast delay, but testing indicated that that was quite wrong.


First, basic testing agrees with Yinnyth. I was able to consistently get 12 threnodies per minute once I got the recast timing down (with only occasional errors). So next I tried to figure out why.

FRAPS analysis of casting time.

I don't have a perfect brd gear set; missing 6% in cast time, and don't have Minstrel's Ring. End up at 40% total.

Changed subjob to /rdm for the extra fast cast to see how it would affect things. That puts me at 55% fast cast.

After adjusting to the slightly different timing, I was able to get 14 spells cast per minute.

14 spells per minute is 4.28 seconds per spell. Can figure the 0.28 is human error, in that I can't cast the next spell at the perfect recast moment, and it's a 4 second recast on a 1 second spellcasting time (after fast cast is applied). That's a 3 second casting delay.

To test this effect, I retried using Minuets. Nominal cast time is 8 seconds.

With /rdm and fast cast gear, time between start of Min4 and Min5 is 7.233 seconds. Actual cast time should have been 3.6 seconds. Difference is 3.6 seconds; with allowance for human error, we still get the 3 second delay.

Tried again with /whm and no fast cast. Time between start of Min4 and Min5 is 11.367 seconds. Subtracting the nominal cast time leaves a 3.367 second window, for 3 seconds plus human error.


Overall conclusion: Minimum delay after the completion of one spell before you can cast another is 3 seconds. Using the fastest casting spells available, plus accounting for human error, lowest realistic time per spell cast is 4 seconds, allowing for 15 spells cast per minute.

[FrankReynolds]

Am I the only one who thinks that these procs are pointless and they should just get rid of them entirely? Why not just add say 50% more HP to the mobs to compensate for the fact that you can kill as fast as you want without proccing and juts get rid of procs? It would open up entire zones instead of having everybody fighting over the same mobs.

[Kincard]

While I'm not a fan of the proc system, that idea doesn't work because removing procs removes all limitations on what job you enter as and how many you can claim at once, so strategies like mass Fell Cleaving and parties monopolizing several groups of monsters at once would not be an uncommon tactic. And if you want to argue that every camp would be open, I think that's precisely what they want to avoid to "control" the amount of ancient currency being brought in. They would reduce the bill drop rate dramatically.

[Hashmalum]

The developers have stated that they don't want to create content that nobody does. That's good. But that is exactly what they have done with magic and weaponskill proc mobs. Nobody tries to proc on them; procs on magic/WS mobs are basically by accident. There's no reason to even kill them in the first place unless they aggro or you are farming non-currency drops like pop items; in neither of these two cases is it worth your time to try and proc. (In the first case you want the aggro out of the way ASAP so you can get back to what you meant to be doing, in the second case procing won't help your drop rates and trying to proc will slow down your kill speed.) If only we could force them to open their damn eyes and actually LOOK at what is going on instead of tossing off some preconceived notion that they have never tested against the reality even once.

[Demon6324236]

I'm confused as to why BLU would be more of a threat than RDM, BLU actually can kill the mob with spells & has alot less MP recovery than RDM does, where as RDM also has alot more on the defensive side (so far as I know) to keep the enemy from really taking them down.

[Hashmalum]

I'm confused as to why BLU would be more of a threat than RDM, BLU actually can kill the mob with spells & has alot less MP recovery than RDM does, where as RDM also has alot more on the defensive side (so far as I know) to keep the enemy from really taking them down.

Because RDM doesn't so much kill mobs as it does annoy them to death.