Printable View
Was noticing about 4 seconds (1 tick) left before reapplying Demolish, and then had a thought: would adding a meditation stack after each demolish be a net dps gain or loss?
Basically trading a GCD for an additional stack towards a guaranteed eventual FC.
On PS4, so all I have is percentages on the SSS dummy, and they are similar with or without.
Mathematically, if you have 4 seconds before Demolish is about to expire and you're about to reapply it, Meditation may be a net potency gain (it takes half the time of another GCD for 50 potency [1/5 of 250] + 50 potency from extra Demolish tick, for 100 potency over half a GCD, which is higher than MNK average from weaponskills). However, that potency gain would heavily depend on skill speed - you need to guarantee an extra tick from Demolish for it to be a gain. Otherwise, it's 50 potency over half a GCD, which is less than average. Doing standard rotation (using two Snap Punches between each Demolish) at GL3 at 1000-ish skill speed I'm only seeing 1-2 seconds left on the timer for me.
I may be wrong on this, but as a rule of thumb, I'd say that overall it's not worth it.
You miss Touch of Death, don't you!?
On topic: I was experimenting with that yesterday and I was getting similar numbers with a normal rotation vs a chakra weave. Sometimes it would be a small gain, other times it wouldn't. In a real boss fight though, whenever a boss does an AoE that forces movement, you can gain chakra then so I figure you don't need to worry much about weaving it during parts of fights where nothings going on.
Thinking a bit more about it, since MNK Meditation actually takes less time than a server tick to perform, it would be hard to gauge whether it would be worth it any particular instance or not, even if you have 3-4 seconds left on the Demolish DoT. For example, if you use Meditation at four seconds left before immediately reapplying Demolish, but the DoT didn't actually apply its potency in the span of time before you do so, that's going to be a loss regardless.
In terms of gauging the effectiveness of "Meditation weaving" from SSS tests, or even parses without further in-depth analysis, minor gains and losses could also be a side-effect of Deep Meditation/Crit/Direct Hit RNG skewing results one way or another. As Gooner mentioned, there's plenty of time for using the ability in less tentative situations. Also, I miss Fracture too.
You may also want to consider the animation of Demolish. At 4 seconds left it is very likely to re-apply the dot after the last tick, making the use of meditation a DPS loss as Svabodnik said.
This would require some test but that's something I would do in 3.0 as I had a lot of skill speed from crafted set before getting my savage/tomestones gears. At this point people would use Fracture to delay instead.
Else you could work on getting less skill speed, it is probably worth more going into crit now.
The only time I can think of when Demolish has 4-5 seconds left on the timer before I can refresh it is when I'm under the influence of Riddle of Fire and can only get in 1 Snap punch rotation as opposed to the standard 2. With that considered, you might be able to squeeze in a Meditation into that time but with the slow from Riddle of Fire, it would take longer for the GCD on Demolish to be up and could potentially fall off while doing the Meditation so I'm not sure if it would be a net gain or not.
Great points, all! Thank you so much.
Does Demolish tick again at 0-1 seconds left?
If I remember correctly, all over-time effects (DoTs, regen, refresh, etc.) tick on server time, rather than relative to the duration of the effect. Exactly when Demolish ticks will happen depends on how it lines up with server clock. Meaning, the last tick can happen anywhere between 3 to 0 seconds out.