Six-Sided Star: Niche Burst, or Even Worse?

With the changes to six-sided star, it now will whack a (single) target for 1580 potency (!) when 10 Chakra are opened from Brotherhood.

Thing is.. it never needed setup before, and was used as "gotta go fast" before Exit, Stage Left. On top of that, you could, with a little extra attention, weave it in now and then when you had Forbidden Chakra up, because FC was the ONLY thing that SSS did not put on cooldown - so you could hit SSS, then FC, then runveryfast. So you weren't totally wasting the extra downtime from its 4-second CD.

Now, however, it needs to eat 10 Chakra and so of course you cannot weave Forbidden Chakra with it. Worse, it used to be a "pop this to smack the boss and run away" button you could use at a moment's notice - now it needs the full 10-count from Brotherhood as setup to do its damage.

Does Six-Sided Star have a use now? Does the metric crapton of burstwhack justify the doubled global? Or is it now even less useful?

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...1432686924b46&

You're misunderstanding how it works. It spends ANY amount of Chakra you have. So you still use it during short downtime or end of phases and is able to spend Chakra when you have less than 5. That means when there's still more downtime you can Meditate from 0 stacks instead of from something like 4 which would've gone to waste.

I understand how it works just fine; you're misunderstanding what I said. My question was, and still is - is it ever worth it to stack the full 10 chakra for the damage, given how high it is? I'm well aware that it plainly states it's +80 potency per chakra, but hey, thanks for the screenshot.

FC potency is 400 and needs 5 stacks to use so 400 divided by 5 equals to 80 potency per Chakra which is the same as SSS's damage gain per Chakra. Purely in terms of Chakra value they're the same. The long GCD from SSS still makes it so you'd only want to use it right before downtime. A SSS at 10 stacks is essentially the same as a base potency SSS and 2 FCs.

I could be misinterpreting its current state, but I think the goal was to make it more effective as a tool for when disconnects occur and increase its burst potential as a finisher. if it helps at all, the top dps monks on the extreme trials currently seem to use it either as the killing blow or don't use it at all.

It's probably best used pre-emptively whenever you know a forced disconnect is coming, to mitigate dps loss while allowing safer play or as the killing blow to ensure your resources are spent at the end of the fight.

I could, however, imagine a situation where you crit direct hit a 10 chakra SSS at the end of buff windows and it provides a measureable enough damage increase as a result. But im not the right person to do that math/theory crafting.