Deciphering Delirium: DRK's damage window

I'd like to start up a discussion on Delirium, Blood Weapon, and Blood Price. I feel that these abilities are less well understood than Bloodspiller and TBN, which significantly more analysis has gone into.

I'm going to mainly focus on single target. As of patch 4.05, 1 DA (2400 MP) is worth 168 potency under Darkside, and 50 blood is worth 165 potency under Darkside with no Grit.

Blood Weapon
Blood Weapon is functionally analogous to FoF and Berserk. The difference is that your actions during the window are converted into MP and blood, which then have to be converted into potency. As with other windows, you want 100% uptime when BW is active to avoid losing additional potency.

Blood Weapon has 3 effects:
1) Reduces auto-attack delay
2) Reduces GCD length
3) Gives 480 MP (0.2 DA) and 3 blood per tick (each tick is worth about 44 potency).

The standard greatsword delay is 2.96s. Under BW, this is 2.66. You gain an extra auto-attack for every 27 seconds of BW uptime.

There are 5 auto attacks in the window, netting 2400 MP and 15 blood.

There are 6-7 GCDs present in the window, netting 2880-3360 MP and 18-21 blood. The cut-off point for the 7th GCD looks to be around 2.38s (2.14 under blood weapon). This works out to be a 67 potency gain/minute. Because Blood Price ticks do not occur when spells are used, any non-weaponskill GCD used in this window is a 44 potency loss.

Overall, you gain about 5760 MP and 36 blood, for a total of 528 potency. Fitting in C+S or Plunge into the window nets you an additional 44 potency each.

As a comparison, FoF gives you about 855 additional potency every minute, while BW gives you 792 (880 if you correctly align your oGCDs in the window, which isn't always possible due to the fact that BW is on a 40s recast, while Plunge and C+S are on 30 and 60s recasts, respectively).

One caveat to this is that BW ends when you activate Grit (imagine if FoF turned off if you switched into ShO). So you're effectively unable to change stance until the window ends (i.e. for 38% of your total uptime).

Another point worth noting is that, when you factor in the gain from Syphon Strike in the window, you gain about 7560 MP. That's about 80% of your MP over two combos. As a result, if you use it immediately on pull, you'll hit cap. You'll want to delay it slightly to align it with your opening burst, giving you some time to drive your MP down and open up some room.


Blood Price
Blood Price is tuned for multiple targets. It restores 120 MP per attack received (0.05 DA) and 1 blood. Each tick is worth 11 potency.

It also gives 4 blood every 3 seconds, regardless of whether you're being hit, as long as there is an active mob present (i.e. it can generate blood while you're sitting around waiting for the boss to do the big wind-up animation for their special move.) This gives you an additional 20 blood (66 potency). You need to be hit roughly 3 times every second to have an equivalent potency gain to Blood Weapon.


Delirium
Delirium gives you 1 DA worth of MP and extends BW by 8 seconds. There are 3 auto attacks and 2-3 GCDs here, netting 2400-2880 MP and 15-18 blood (264 potency). If you execute it correctly, you gain 267 potency (for a total of 789 potency). If you don't, you gain 3 potency instead. It also commits you to staying out of Grit for the next 23 seconds.

If you choose to use Delirium on Blood Price, it gives you a 16 second extension. This gives you a total of 40 guaranteed blood (132 potency). You now need to be hit about 4 times per second to break even with the Delirium-BW window. This is unlikely to happen in single target. You're also committed to stay in Grit for the next 30 seconds.

The new Quietus is interesting. It has a built in BW effect, giving you 480 MP (0.2 DA) per mob. I'm not really sure what the trade-offs are between Quietus, Delirium-BW, and Delirium-BP are, but I suspect that you're probably going to prefer to spend resources on Quietus over the other two. So I'm not really sure what role Delirium-BP has at all.

Thoughts?

My thoughts are use Delirium with Blood Weapon.

Blood Price is really underwhelming in ST mode now, but thanks to the Quietus change I don't think they can really let up on its nerf.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Thoughts?

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First of all thank you for this post.

Delirium is very poorly understood because it all-but-requires you to do math to figure out what Berserk and FoF spell out for you in simple terms.

I've discussed this at length with folks on The Balance discord, and (apparently) Delirium is a raw potency gain over Bloodspiller no matter what you use it on and I feel that this is not very well known.

While Blood Price is tuned for AoE/MT, while tanking ST you have Syphon Strike's increased mana return to close the gap, which I think is actually a bit undertuned. No accounting for Bloodspiller use, Syphon Strike works out to something like 166 extra mana per second while in Grit (again, even less when factoring in BS use), which does not add up to the 360 mana per second (3 BP procs) that you outlined in your post, factoring in a BP proc every ~3s or so. I struggle a bit with the blood math that goes with this, but it doesn't seem properly balanced with Blood Weapon at all.

I think we start to see here why DRK's Bloodspiller is balanced in/out of Grit the way it is, because the difference between BW and BP is pretty big, and easily analogous to the difference between, say, ShO HS and SwO HS, or IB and FC.

Considering that PLD has a whole other window filling in the gap between FoF windows, Delirium (and IR for that matter, on WAR) seem somewhat undertuned. These abilities feel far more like 90s recasts than 120, at least.

Considering that DA is a 56% increase to Syphon Strike, 46% to Souleater, and 35% to Bloodspiller, we can actually math out the potency increase to continued DAing of these abilities that BW and Delirium BW provide.

For instance, lets say during every BW window, for your 7 GCDs, you...

HS- DASS- DASE- HS- DASS- DASE- DABS
(0 + 56 + 46 + 0 + 56 + 46 + 35) / 7 = 34.1%

Considering this can happen every 40 seconds and doesn't even factor in the attack speed increase, its actually a bit puzzling as to why DRK's damage is somewhat undertuned. It comes out to about a 12% increase over 40s, but its not confined to that 15s duration, but to your MP. You could technically emulate a Berserk-like DPS increase if you refrained from DAing as much as possible without capping outside of BW, and then went to pound town when BW comes back up. I think this is particularly important for maximizing party buff windows, but I think it would really help us consolidate our rotation if our potencies were tuned to allow for a % damage dealt increase buff to build all of this madness around. DRK's damage is extremely granular, but because we don't have anything to give it a concrete form, we're left with a job that is disappointing to maximize because the payoff is very small. There is of course, TBN, but as you stated, theorycrafting around that ability is already pretty plentiful and we're talking about Delirium/BP/BW here.

As far as openers go, I typically recommend a fully DAed (DASS-DASE) Souleater combo before you even pop Blood Weapon or TBN to proc Delirium blood. This ensures you don't cap.